


never saw you coming

by dimpleforyourthoughts



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Homophobic Language, Hurt/Comfort, Idiots in Love, M/M, Misunderstandings, Mutual Pining, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Trigger Warning: Africa by Toto, idiots who would rather die than talk about their feelings, or rather
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-21
Updated: 2016-10-21
Packaged: 2018-08-17 10:22:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 47,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8140553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimpleforyourthoughts/pseuds/dimpleforyourthoughts
Summary: Three months in space on his own would have been fine. Three months in space with Lance McClain is a whole other fucking story.





	

**Author's Note:**

> -This fic is dedicated to [Nina](http://jhholtzmann.tumblr.com), who I promised I'd write a 20k+ fic after she baked me a pie about a year ago. Sorry it took so long. Hopefully the Soft Ghèy Angst will make up for it.  
> -I set out to write a fic about Lance through Keith's POV because I love Lance so very much. And then I fell in love with Keith more than I could have ever anticipated, and dove into the trash can. Apologies for the mess you're about to wade into.  
> -Thanks to [K](http://eggilbert.tumblr.com), the Trash Jedi Master to my Trash Padawan. And to [Jessie](http://embarrassedpokerface.tumblr.com) , for quite literally everything else.  
> - **Content Warning** : potentially triggering eating behavior at one point, off-screen torture, and underage drinking. See endnotes for specifics/spoilers.  
> 

When Keith Kogane was six years old, somewhere after foster family number two and three, and sometime before his social worker got concerned enough to send Keith to his first of many therapists, Keith’s foster parents sent him to Space Camp.

Space Camp was a loose term for the place, in all actuality. “Space Camp” was a handful of busywork activities put together by an underfunded Parks & Rec program meant to keep kids out of the house away from their exhausted parents and off the streets away from trouble.

While he was a little too jaded—even at six—to find the intrinsic value of arts n crafts, Keith nevertheless sat around with dozens of other kids and dutifully applied himself to making spatter paint star charts and papier-mâché solar systems. It wasn’t particularly fun, but he wasn’t interested in much else, not in playing outside with the bigger kids, making friends. Keith knew that if he behaved well, and did what he was told, he wouldn’t have to pack up all his stuff and move again. Even if he hated where he lived right now, the thought of starting over again—with new foster brothers and sisters, with a new house, with a new bed—made him sick to his stomach. So for most of the day activities, he sat quietly, away from the other kids, and did what he was told.

But after the sun went down on the last day of camp, all campers got to take a night trip to the local planetarium, and Keith got to look through the huge telescope. Other kids his age were noisy and restless, bored by planets that weren’t imploding, wondering why they couldn’t see the shooting stars instead. Keith was small for his age, so he had to ask to borrow a stepping stool to get on eye level with the telescope. He stood on tiptoes, and his jaw dropped at what he saw.

He’d stared into the peephole of the telescope, up into the abyss of a sky that seemed to spill over with infinite possibilities of galaxies and constellations. He stared at the stars, the pale moon, and all that endless black behind it. He’d stared and stared and stared, stared until the planetarium closed, stared until his camp counselors had to practically drag him off to get back on the bus, stared so much he could see those stars and that moon on the backs of his eyes when he closed them.

He never forgot that first glimpse of space, the hunger it put in his already empty belly.

At six years old, a lot of things felt pretty set in stone to Keith Kogane. At six years old, the facts of the universe included a select few things:

That he was smaller than most of the other kids his age.

That his clothes would always smell funny or look slightly dirty because that’s all his foster parents could afford with eight kids in one house.

That when he was born, his mama didn’t want him.

That he would never know exactly why.

He carried those facts around with him every day like some people wore watches, a constant reorientation of who he was, where he was, why he was. Looking up into that telescope, Keith added another fact into his list: He wanted to go up into space. He wanted to be able to reach up and brush his fingertips against the twinkling stars.

He wanted, plain and simple, to be anywhere but here.

\--

Now that he is here, Keith admits that his six-year-old self might have made a slight error in judgment. Sure, space is just as beautiful and breathtaking as it was the first time he saw it. But after three months floating around in a giant flying castle, and nearly dying on half the days in those three months, Keith is pretty sure that space isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

He can’t help but think that this feeling mainly stems from the fact that he is not alone in space, or rather, that he’s having to share space and a general enjoyment of the galaxies with someone who is not so enjoyable at all.

Three months in space on his own would have been fine. Three months in space with Lance McClain is a whole other fucking story.

A million light-years away from the small, quiet boy who did what he was told and never toed the line, Keith lands his giant fighting space lion on a foreign planet, bristling with righteous fury. He leaps from the cockpit, landing catlike as he rips off his helmet, effectively cutting off all the warnings of his teammates as he beelines for one lion in particular, grounding just a few feet away.

“What the hell was that?” Keith shouts at the blue lion. “You were supposed to have my six!”

The blue lion shudders and its mouth opens as the perpetual thorn in Keith’s proverbial side clambers out of the cockpit.

“I did have your six!” Lance exclaims. He mirrors Keith and pulls off his helmet, his hair sticking in every which direction in a careless mess.

“Yeah, right until you decided to pull off some kamikaze maneuver that nearly got both of us killed,” Keith spits. “I don’t know if anyone’s notified you, but this isn’t the Galaxy Garrison anymore. You’re not getting graded for stealing the spotlight here.”

The most annoying thing about knowing Lance is the simple fact that Lance in and of himself is about the least harmful person Keith has ever met. A self-professed heartbreaker and “hero of the galaxy”, Keith has yet to see him do any breaking, or any heroics for that matter. Before Shiro had come back to earth, Keith had barely been aware of who Lance was, their own apparent “rivalry” unknown to him until Lance conveniently announced it.

Even after meeting Lance and knowing Lance, Keith really didn’t _care_ who Lance was. He didn’t care until Lance made it his goddamn mission to beat Keith at everything. It was annoying, at first. Now it just made Keith damn near murderous, the kind of frustration that’s built itself up after months of Lance being the perpetual fly buzzing in his ear.

They’d been running one of many training drills under Shiro’s command, Allura firing the occasional shots from the castle. Keith had been right in the middle of a viper-like maneuver, upside down and spiraling, when Lance had cut him off and nearly sent Keith tail spinning into the walls of the canyon they were flying in.

Lance is about the least harmful person Keith has ever met, except for those few occasions where his colossal ego gets in Keith’s way.

“Look, I know you’re used to being Keith the Tall Dark Lone-Wolf, but we’re part of a _team_ now. If you can’t handle not being the star pilot—”

“This isn’t about being the star pilot!” Keith storms up to Lance, jabbing a finger in his chest. “This is about _you_ and your goddam _ego_ getting us nearly blasted out of space because you just _had to insist_ on being the best.”

“So you admit it. I _am_ the best.” Lance’s indignation morphs into a knowing smirk, as he crosses his arms over his chest.

Keith has been, these past few months, an elastic rubber band, stretched tight each and every time Lance opens his mouth. Now, he’s all but ready to let go of all self-control and let the rubber band inside of him just _snap_.

Years of forced counseling and being given “tools” for “coping” had taught Keith that the best rubber bands are durable, can stretch and accommodate the extra strain. The best rubber bands do not break.

But sometimes Keith wants to be a little worse than the best, because sometimes it feels too fucking good.

(The first time Keith snapped was the first time he had been in one of the foster homes. He’d cleaned up the glass from the broken window and apologized to the neighbor’s kid, who’d asked him why he didn’t have a mom.

The second time he’d gone home with a broken arm, a mouthful of lies for ready-made delivery, and the taunting insult of _faggot_ etched in the inside of his mouth where his teeth had cut his cheek after the first punch.

The third time he was dishonorably discharged, and his only friend in the world was dead.)

He weighs those three occasions against this one. Lance has always been annoying, unable to take anything seriously unless it’s a life or death scenario, but even then it’s touch and go.

“I’ll admit that you’re an idiot. And if you ever pull shit like that again, I will kick your ass.”

Lance’s smirk grows impossibly wider. It’s a smile Keith knows by feel as much as he does by sight, by the way it makes him want to peel it off and tear it to shreds with his bare hands. “Big words for such a small guy.”

Keith hears the Black Lion touch down a few yards away from them, knows the others can’t be far behind. He doesn’t have the energy today to put up with admonishment from Shiro, nor Allura for that matter. There would be too great a fallout if he were to snap and kill Lance in the process.

It’s not worth it. Keith reigns in that rubber band, loosens his grip on the elastic.

With a huffed breath and a roll of his eyes, he turns heel and heads back for Red.

“What, no last ditch effort to have the final say?” Lance shouts after Keith. “C’mon, what happened to bonding?”

Keith holds up his middle finger with one hand and shoves his helmet back on with the other, retreating from the sound of Lance’s laughter.

Red seems wholly unsympathetic to his irritation and bucks a little bit for the rest of the flight whenever he tries to take control too much. Practice ended pretty much the moment he decided to start fighting with his teammates, but Keith flies until the sun touches down on the horizon, until the sky bleeds both red and blue.

 

\--

Keith is terrible at sleeping.

You live in enough places, move to just the right amount of empty rooms, meet the right amount of new classmates, new teachers, new “families” that feel as fake and manufactured as they appear, and you manage to condition yourself out of needing to be comfortable.

That kind of relaxation—the one that allows you to belong in places, the one that allows sleep longer than fitful catnaps—is a myth to Keith, like some kind of fucked up childhood fairy tale. As elusive as Santa Claus, or the Tooth Fairy.

It’s not that Keith doesn’t like sleep. Sleep just doesn’t seem to like him.

He’s closed his eyes too many times—on a bus, on a train, in the backseat of his social worker’s car—and found himself in another place, another life, one that somehow felt more ill-fitting than the last. If he slept too heavy in group homes, he’d get his shit stolen, or pranked in some way by the other kids that didn’t know him and didn’t care to. He’d learned early on that it wasn’t smart to sleep like you weren’t prepared for battle.

So when he slept, _if_ he slept, it was by making himself as small and inconspicuous as possible. Knees tucked to his chest, hand curled under the pillow around a switchblade.

(Sometimes it felt like even when he did sleep, his mind wouldn’t let him. Sometimes his grip on the knife slipped, and then tightened until the blade cut through skin. Sometimes he woke, eyes and palm stinging, with red on the pillow.

Sometimes, that was better than being asleep anyhow.)

After the argument with Lance, and a stern talking to from Allura and the quiet disappointment of Shiro and the rest of his teammates, Keith knows all too well that he’s not sleeping a wink, doesn’t even bother trying to tell himself the lie that he will. He tries to settle comfortably on the bed, reading over schematics for the ship that Coran let him borrow, trying to study flight patterns that were written out in a dead language. Unfortunately for him, Keith feels like a big cat in a small cage, itchy to get out, even though leaving his room means he risks having to interact with any of his teammates, which he really doesn’t feel like doing right now.

He waits until the time monitor tells him that everyone _should_ be asleep right now, and then slips out of bed to pad down the hallways. He has no way of knowing exactly what time it is, given that they only have a few Earth-time telling devices between the five of them. Yet the lucid charge in the air feels like three am, the in-between state of too late and just early enough.

Bare feet on cold metal, Keith lets the continued anger from earlier lead him to the training deck. He boots up the combat training bot and shuts off the finer parts of his brain—particularly the ones that recognize that he maybe shouldn’t have gone off on Lance as much as he did—and gets to work.

It’s easy to lose himself in the purely physical and instinctual. Being a pilot is _easy_ , fighting is _easy_ , and giving in to that ease is the best reprieve from himself that he gets.

He spars with the training bot until he’s sore and worn with it, an exhausting high. He smiles, even as he aches.

But even that becomes dull after a time, and Keith resolves himself to heading for the kitchens for something to eat. The tension unknots in his shoulders, finding comfort in the notion that he won’t have to interact with anyone for at least a solid chunk of hours.

Or so he thought.

“Hey!” Lance says from the kitchen table. He smiles, the expression stopping Keith in his tracks. He hadn’t been expecting that, certainly not after arguing.

“Uh. Hi.” Keith lingers awkwardly in the doorway, not sure if he’s intruding on something.

“Come here often?” The line sounds forced, and it occurs to Keith for the first time that he might not be the only one feeling slightly awkward and guilty about everything. It feels like a peace offering, wrapped up in a cheesy and likely ill-timed joke. As far as Keith knows, it might be the closest he ever gets to a genuine apology from Lance.

He continues to stare, and Lance turns back to what looks to be a bowl of goop, dragging his spoon through the bright green concoction and looking miserable as he does so.

“Couldn’t sleep?” Lance tries again, after a few moments of tense silence.

Keith shakes his head. “You?”

Lance opens his mouth with what looks like a ready-made cocky response, but he seems to change tactics halfway through. “Nah. I was sleeping just fine. I got hungry and it uh… woke me up.”

Keith had—in stubborn opposition—been inside his room when everyone had eaten dinner, but he can’t imagine Lance having missed it. Lance had the stereotypical teenage boy appetite that Keith had somehow managed to skip during puberty, meaning Lance ate everything and anything that was put before him.

“You not get enough at dinner?”

“Wasn’t hungry.” Lance shrugs again, smiling and leaning back in his chair, the picture of ease. “Making up for it now, but I’m having trouble.”

Keith raises his eyebrows. “You? Trouble eating?”

He earns himself a slight glare at that, followed by Lance stubbornly swallowing a spoonful with a quiet _hmph_ as if to prove a point. He immediately spits it back into the bowl, shoving back and groaning, “God. I can’t do it. I honestly can’t do it. Jesus, I am so _sick_ of eating this _crap._ ”

Made slightly queasy by the sight of Lance backwashing a substance that’s already pretty ghastly looking to begin with, Keith, despite himself, feels his lips pull upward. “It’s not that bad.”

“Oh yeah? Why don’t you have some then?” Lance waves the spoon threateningly in Keith’s direction.

Keith laughs, the sound of it like a long dead engine turning over and sputtering back to life. It takes him by surprise. He can’t even cover it up with a huff of breath.

A curious kind of excited look breaks over Lance’s face at the sound, the same look he gets when Shiro announces that they need to get to the Lions. And just like that, the bickering Keith had expected, the annoyance of it all, is abated. The kitchen light is soft, and for this single moment, the red and blue paladins are not at each other’s throats.

Rather than walking out or sitting down, Keith chooses the safer middle ground and leans against the doorframe of the kitchen, crossing his arms over his chest. It’s too easy to silently study Lance as he talks, because Lance talks and talks without prompting. That’s just the kind of person Lance is: a fill the awkward silence with rambling kind of guy because somewhere between here and the womb he got the idea talking was the remedy for damn near anything.

“I miss earth food,” Lance confesses after maybe a single second of pause, “God. I miss it so much I even miss the bad food. Like… cold Domino’s pizza. Or the room temperature chili dogs from 7-11. The _worst_ , but I would give my right arm for either of those about now.”

Keith is loathe to agree but Lance is right. They can only eat so much of one unappealing food before pretty much anything starts to look appetizing by contrast. He was never heavily into food the way Lance or Hunk might be, but even he misses certain things about Earth. Fresh orange juice. Strawberry pop-tarts. Oyster crackers.

Across the kitchen, Lance is smiling again, his mouth twisting to the side, “My ma, she used to cook these big meals for us, and I mean _big,_ had to with five mouths to feed. Before I left for the Garrison, she started teaching me how to make everything she knew, had this big cookbook with family recipes, and new recipes shoved in-between the pages. Best goddamn Cubanos you’ve ever tasted. Man, I miss home.” He wilts a little at the confession, looking out the portside window, at the cascade of stars passing them by. “But I guess it’ll be a while before I get back to them all. But when I do, I’m going to eat Cubanos every day for at least a year.”

In Keith’s mind’s eye he pulls up the quick snapshot he’d seen of Lance’s family when they’d all meditated together in an attempt to form Voltron for the second time. It had been a large group of people, but it’d been impossible to miss Lance’s mom. She had the same warm brown skin and perpetual laugh lines at the corner of her eyes. Lance talks about his family often, like this adventure is a weekend getaway, or a summer vacation, rather than a mission to save all the planets in the universe with no end in sight, because the universe has no end in sight.

Space, as far as human intelligence knew, was infinite. That’s a lot of fucking planets to save.

“What are you going to do when you get back?” Lance asks.

 _If we get back_.

It’s things like this that really baffle the mind in regards to Lance. Back at the Garrison, the other fighter pilots in Keith’s bunker had running bets on who would die first, a pot that grew with every day of test flights and crazy runs of the simulator. Fighter pilots loved the daring of it, the ego in the idea of a definite but unknown early expiration date, live fast, die young, all that bullshit.

You had to be a little bit crazy to fly faster than the speed of sound, to want to go into space with guarantees of dying. Keith, fighter pilot first class, was the one the other pilots bet on the most, naturally. He’d felt his ominous blaze-of-glory death ticking away like a timer, since the day he’d first gotten into the cockpit. Feels it tick louder and louder every minute they spend out here in space, every time a new distress call comes up.

Pilots are ready to die. Keith knows this because he’s never once thought about what he’s going to do beyond this mission, or where he’ll go next. He’ll save the universe and probably die while doing it. That’s what pilots are trained to do.

Lance McClain doesn’t talk like a pilot.

“Dunno,” Keith mutters as he looks at his arms, suddenly unable to meet Lance’s open curiosity face to face. “Take a nap, probably. Go see a movie.”

“That’s pretty boring, Keith. Even for a stick in the mud like you.”

“I’ve been a little too preoccupied on the mission at hand to plan my vacation,” Keith snaps, hackles suddenly raised.

Lance only shrugs in lazy surrender, which unnerves Keith even further, somehow, before going back to the bowl of goop, staring it down in a silent contest of wills. Moments later, his face brightens with an idea and he gropes for the spoon, closes his eyes.

“This”—Lance shoves a spoonful of the green goop in his mouth—“is a garlic knot from that Italian place down the street from my Mom’s house. And this”—he shoves in another, creating a more grotesque picture by the second—“is a frozen custard, with chocolate syrup, the kind that makes a hard shell. Mmm. Delicious.”

It takes Keith a minute, but then the recognition seeps in uneasily. He knows this game too well. It’s the take a shitty situation and imagine it better game. No one was better at this game than Keith.

His therapists back on earth had called it daydreaming. Looking at Lance now, he can’t help but think they’d been right.

“You’re an idiot,” he says on reflex.

“True. But I’m an idiot with a mouthful of quiche Lorraine right now, so is that really a bad thing in this case?”

Of course, when Keith played the game, it always had felt like surviving. It had felt like the only way to get out of bed, just scrape himself off the mattress and piece himself together, pretending that things were better than they actually were.

At age ten, he could make squeaky cots and scratchy sheets into down comforters and mattresses, the specialist who asked him to color or talk about his feelings into a talking animal. He could take the stale bread and government cheese at the group homes and make it spaghetti and meatballs, or take his empty stomach and imagine it full to bursting of cookies and ice cream. He played the game nonstop, and he won every time.

Now, his thoughts skitter away from the subject on instinct, careful not to linger too long; these are the places unsafe to wander in the middle of the night, when walls inside him are down. Places blacker and more dangerous than space itself.

“Can I ask you something?” Lance, again, cuts through Keith’s quiet thought like a stray firework, absolutely unaware of what he’s interrupting.

“Something tells me you’ll ask regardless of whether I say yes or not,” Keith says wryly.

Lance tips his head to the side a bit, giving Keith another considering look, like he hasn’t actually decided what to ask Keith, because he hadn’t expected to Keith to let him ask something.

“What did you do in the desert for a year? Like, not when you helped track down my Lion and stuff, but before that.”

Keith blinks, this question throwing him even further than the last. It sounds so straightforward coming out of Lance’s mouth, like the past year had been an extended vacation. A few things snap into fine focus, maybe because Keith had never thought of it that way, or maybe because it finally seemed so obvious, coming from someone else.

He’d spent a year in the desert, technically stationary but lost in every other way. It was Lance’s lion that Keith found, that brought Keith back to a point of focus and drive. It made sense that he’d felt the pull to Blue, being that it was the only part of Voltron on Earth. But the lion belonged to Lance, had chosen _Lance_. Even though Keith had technically found it, it hadn’t chosen him, not even then. He had been in that desert shack alone, searching for a gaping something; but when that something came it hadn’t been his lion, his destiny, that Keith had found.

It had been the Blue Lion, meant for Lance.

And before that… before that.

(Before that Keith would go days without sleep, nearly climb the walls with the itchy feeling in his skin. Before that Keith stared up at starry skies as what felt like a wormhole opened up inside his chest as he wondered where home could be found if not on the same planet he was born. Before that Keith turned off everything inside of him that wasn’t selfish survival instinct, because anything more complicated than that was too heavy to maintain.)

Before that was none of Lance’s damn business, that’s for sure.

“What do you mean, what did I do?” Keith finds himself snapping. “It’s not like I had much on my social calendar, between thinking Shiro was dead and being a next level conspiracy theorist.”

If the question was meant to be fuel for an argument, Lance doesn’t treat it that way.

“Hey, no need to be defensive,” he says, surprisingly even-keeled. It somehow frustrates Keith even more, this mellower version of the person who’d been at his throat just a few hours ago. “Just an innocent question.”

Keith stares at him doubtfully, so Lance just turns back to his goop, shoveling another spoonful with a muttered, “Chipotle Burrito Bowl,” and a measured chew.

“And you?” Keith asks, after a pause. “What did you do before I found your lion?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Lance licks his spoon clean, giving Keith another wide smile. “I became the best pilot in the Garrison.”

He became the best pilot in the Garrison, while Keith went hunting for the thing Lance was meant to pilot. The unknowing camaraderie and teamwork, the fated connection of it all puts Keith on edge. He doesn’t like fate, he doesn’t like things being out of his control. He likes his life on his terms and only his terms.

Turns out not even his terms were his to have.

“I’m tired,” he lies, pushing off the wall, stomach growling in protest. “Get some sleep. And don’t eat all the food.”

Lance half rises, like he’s belatedly realized that he said something to piss Keith off, surprise, surprise. An expression of… something very un-Lance-like shutters off after a split second, and he narrows his eyes slightly, that competitive smirk coming back into play.

“Goodnight, _mom_.”

It’s likely another invitation for a second spat, only this time Keith is actually too tired to rise to the occasion. He walks out before he finds the need to have the last word, feeling somehow more vulnerable and antsy than when he’d first left his room. Like he’d left there to escape himself and had somehow only found more of himself in the process.

It had been easier back at the Garrison, where everyone was trying to get ahead and be the best and so no one bothered giving a fuck about what Keith did or how he was feeling. But now Keith is part of Voltron, which means that at any point in the day, he has four teammates who want to bond, or whatever, and a princess who demands he participate in the bonding, and that he play nice.

It’s not that Keith doesn’t like his teammates… or, most of them, at least. Pidge with her general flat tone of sarcasm and genius mind, and Hunk with his warm temperament that was at worst unbearably kind, always a laugh, and Shiro with… well he’s Shiro. So pure in his ideals and intentions that it’s impossible for Keith to not respect him, to not wish he had an ounce of the leadership that seems to naturally radiate off of him in droves. Even Lance—when he’s not being a fucking tool, or finding every reason under the sun to get under Keith’s skin—can be tolerable.

All of Keith’s teammates are likeable. It’s just that he wishes, on more days than most, that they could interpret his distance as being exactly what he wanted from them in return: _distance_.

But apparently that is asking the impossible, Keith surmises bitterly, punching his pillow into a more comfortable shape as he crashes back on his mattress.

He inhales deep, pushing breath to the aching parts of him, and settles in for a long-haul kind of night. Restless sleep and dreaming with eyes open, stars and galaxies on the backs of his eyelids each time he blinks.

\--

There’d been a cat in foster home number nine, where he’d stayed for a record time of six short weeks. She was a scrawny old tabby with mange, the tip of an ear missing, yellow eyes, and disdain for pretty much any sort of human interaction that wasn’t absolutely on her terms. Her name was Ginger, and she was the most miserable animal Keith had ever come across. Most of the kids in the home steered cleared of her entirely, but on the rare occasion that they accidentally tripped over her, or suddenly reached out to gently pet her matted fur, she came alive with a ferocity and ire that defied her age, and almost always left claw marks, sometimes even drawing blood.

It wasn’t that Ginger was a mean cat. One of those cats that followed and hunted down the kids for the sole purpose of attacking them. To her credit, Ginger often seemed quite serene when left to her own devices, occasionally brushed up against the back of Keith’s legs while he sat still doing homework. She was perfectly happy and sweet, until the very second you invaded her space or touched her without her approaching you first.

When asked why Ginger hated everyone and anyone, Keith’s foster-dad-of-the-week tried his best to explain it in simple terms. She’d been a stray, he said, malnourished and abandoned in a dumpster as a kitten. When they tried to lift her up she’d hissed and spat at them. Eventually they lured her indoors with treats and warm milk, but even then she came and went as she pleased. She did not socialize. She did not let herself be touched. She did not get close unless she sensed you wouldn’t try to make her stay close.

Some animals, foster-dad-of-the-week explained, were just that: all primal instinct and no domesticated urge. She’d grown up that way and so she stayed that way: a wild, untrusting, lonely thing.

\--

In no time at all, they’re back at it again. In a world that’s felt turned upside down and inside out since the second they took off from Earth, Keith can’t but help but notice that it’s grounding. Things change, planets burn, they fight battles and they lose others. But at least this remains the same.

“Has it always been like this with them?” Allura asks the morning after the kitchen incident, as Keith and Lance bicker over the sweetener at breakfast. “Better yet, is there something we can do to turn it off?”

She’d probably been hoping for a more quiet morning. But that pretty much went to shit when Keith _dared_ to use the last of the sweetener in his tea, to which Lance took loud and vocal offense. Several minutes later, everyone at the table has taken sides, Keith is sipping his sweetened tea with a smirk and Lance is glaring viciously.

It is petty but it feels good, normal. Like the twilight zone of three am kitchen conversations had never existed to begin with, which was how it should have been in the first place.

“The only way to turn it off is to give them a common enemy,” Shiro says with a small smirk. “Where’s Zarkon when you need him?”

Keith finishes his tea, grateful for the sensation of solid ground beneath him as Lance kicks at him under the table.

\--

It’s in the dead of night when the ship loses power, so quiet that they don’t even notice it until the next morning, once everyone has woken up.

The castle had been right in the midst of a charted course to a distress call beacon. There is no warning from the ship about the pending loss of power, no course gone awry.

Keith is already up, of course, but the eerie glow of low-power emergency lights in his bunker bring him to high alert. Nothing regular turns on, not the way it should. Keith shoulders his way through the door into the main hallway, finding to little to no resistance. It’s not locked, it’s just lifeless, the mechanism inside in a similar state. The near comforting hum of the ship’s engine is nowhere to be heard.

When he arrives in the bridge, it doesn’t look good. The ship isn’t dropping out of orbit, hasn’t crashed. They’re not being dragged by an enemy ship’s magnetic field nor are they out of fuel. But it’s arguably worse.

He walks to the observation deck, and stares out around them. The castle itself floats in space like a bloated fish, belly up in a poisoned lake. Around them are other ships, or, rather, fragments of them, some torn to shreds, others burnt to a crisp, a few perfectly intact, but centuries old in their mechanics. What strikes Keith most is the stillness. There’s not even a drift of orbit, a single movement of space, to be seen, the entire castle and its surrounding scenery frozen in tableaux.

“The lions are down,” Shiro announces a few moments later, walking in to stand at Keith’s shoulder.

“Yeah no kidding!” Lance pipes up. “I was going to do my regular morning checkup of Blue, and I couldn’t even get to her on the zip line!”

“What’s going on?” Shiro asks, effectively ignoring Lance, and turning to Allura, who’s whispering to Coran at the helm. “Did we do this on purpose?”

“No,” Allura replies, frowning as she tries to tinker with the control panel, but nothing is responding. “We’ve hit dead space.”

“Dead space?”

“Nothing mechanical or energy-based functions here. Even quintessence is pretty much void, which means your Lions are void.”

“Why wasn’t this on the map? I mean, shouldn’t we have seen it coming?”

“There’s no way to see it coming. It’s a bit like a black hole in the sense that you don’t really know _what_ happens. These areas of uncharted space are rather unpredictable, mostly because the people that do witness them don’t survive.”

“They call these deadzones,” Coran says cheerily. “Or uh, Space Graveyards. It’s a patch of space where no power or technological advancements work, and you’re suspended in space!”

“So how do we get out?”

“Well, typically, you don’t. They call them Space Graveyards because of all the ships that just lie here. Either the crew abandons ship and dies in space or waits and dies inside. It happens more often than you think.”

“We’ll have to think of something. There’s got to be something in this castle that can get us out of here. Hunk, Pidge, take inventory of our fuel and tech stuff, grab anything that is still working by any chance. Keith, Lance, you two go to the kitchens with Coran and see how much food we’ve got before we run out. If we don’t know the deadline of when we’re getting out of here, we’ll have to be in survival mode.”

“And what are you going to do?” Lance asks.

“I’ll stay here with the Princess and see if we can chart where the nearest port is. It’ll be our first stop once we get out.”

The heavy _if_ goes unspoken.

They divide up and get to work. It’s just a few days rationing food and being cooped up until they figure something out.

“Don’t worry team. We’ll pull through like we always do. We’ve got emergency power, and it’s not enough to go anywhere, but it’s enough to survive on until we figure a way out. It won’t be that bad.”

\--

Shiro turns out to be wrong. It’s actually that bad.

These slow periods of stasis happen often—they’re not _always_ fighting to save the universe. But these doldrums are usually interspersed with varying degrees of activity, either Shiro drilling them over and over in training exercises that leave them too exhausted to feel the uneventfulness of life aboard a floating castle, or Allura teaching them inter-planetary customs, or Pidge and Hunk testing out some new gadget that leaves enough room for entertainment. There’s always something to do.

But here, in the dead zone, there’s no power, no food to snack on to fill the boredom, and no training exercises they can do with their lions down. It’s hand-to-hand combat at first, but in an effort to conserve their energy, it’s minimal activity, which only serves to drive Keith a little more towards the edge.

It’s not helped at all by the fact that Lance appears to be doing everything within his power to be a pain in the ass.

Keith doesn’t notice at first, maybe because it’s Lance and Lance always seems dedicated to the cause of pissing Keith off, but even he seems to have reached a new peak.

The trick, Keith knows, is not letting himself react to it. Usually, if Keith can resist bickering with Lance for the first few hours of being awake, he can coast through the rest of the day in a blissful cloud of not giving a shit.

That doesn’t turn out to be the case today, nor any other day this week.

Maybe it’s the kitchen interaction. The glimpse of a Lance that, once seen, cannot be forgotten, works under Keith’s skin, and makes ignoring Lance’s general existence absolutely impossible.

“I’m focused on getting us out of here as soon as possible,” Keith says pointedly, “We’ve got work to do!” They’re taking inventory for what feels like the fiftieth time, and Keith has lost count for the third time because _someone_ won’t stop talking.

He’s lost count, but he’s aware enough to know whatever specific quantity of food there is remaining, it’s not enough.

“Ah, work schmerk, I’m bored! I want action! Adventure! Ladies!”

Keith resists the urge to roll his eyes again—he doesn’t want to sprain something, after all. “So you want all the glory and none of the guts. You picked a pretty crappy place to get it. No one even knows we’re out here!”

“We really should get on that marketing for Team Voltron,” Hunk quips, holding a food packet in each hand and grinning in that conspiratorial way that best friends of Lance do. “Maybe a social media presence would get us more of a following!”

“Yes!” Lance leaps up, giddy as all get out. “I love it! Get those hashtags trending.”

And they’re off. Keith often wonders how a friendship like Lance and Hunk’s came to be. At first glance it just appears that Lance is the leader and Hunk the willing follower. But the more Keith sees them interact, it’s very clear that Lance has a dependency on Hunk’s support that isn’t just a need for blind attention or admiration. They ground each other. But they also feed into each other’s shenanigans to a rather annoying degree, speaking so rapid-fire that everyone else has a hard time keeping up.

Example A, this entire conversation.

“God, can you imagine seeing trading cards or souvenirs with your face on them?” Lance sprawls back as if dreaming on the floor, laughing to himself. “Jerseys for each Paladin? We’d all have our respective media personas. I, of course would be the dashing roguish one. Pidge, you’d be the super smarts, like Velma!”

“Oh, jinkies,” Pidge says in a deadpan voice, not sounding enthused at all. Keith suppresses a smirk.

“Hunk would be our comic relief, of course. And if I’m tall, dark, and handsome, then Keith would obviously be short, angry, and brooding.”

“Hilarious,” Keith says, matching Pidge’s enthusiasm and earning himself a tiny fist bump of solidarity before she turns back to work. “You realize of course that you’re talking nonsense.” He throws a hand up, annoyed. “No one back home _cares_ we’re out here. The Garrison would kick us out again if we came back, and would anyone even believe stories about giant flying robot lions?”

Lance raises an eyebrow, like Keith’s a small child that just started prattling about Santa Claus. “Speak for yourself, man. I’ve got a worrywart mother who’s probably hollering her way through NASA as we speak to come and rescue me herself, bless her heart.”

“Same here,” Hunk says. “I’ve got an older brother who would kill me if I missed his wedding.”

“Mom’s already lost Matt and Dad,” Pidge says quietly. “I don’t think she’d let me get away so easily.” She looks out glass, into the vast galaxy they’re zooming through. “She’s looking for me. I know it.”

The air in the room gets oddly quiet, and it isn’t until Lance addresses him that Keith realizes it’s because _he_ was supposed to contribute something to the conversation.

“How about you, Keith?” Lance raises an eyebrow. “You’ve gotta have like… an equally tiny and angry mom who’s kicking up a storm now that her precious prodigy child is missing, right?”

This recurring theme of Lance prying into his personal life is something Keith wants to cut off before it grows any more common. He squares his jaw, eyes narrowing. “I’m not counting on a fanbase to get me back home, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“So who are you counting on to get you back home? Got a girlfriend?”

“Why do you keep pushing this, huh?” Keith snaps, “Shouldn’t we be doing something more useful, like, hey, I don’t know, finding a way out of the dead space? If you haven’t noticed, we’re not exactly vacationing at the Hilton over here. We’re stranded!”

“Oh yeah? And what exactly are _you_ doing to help right now?”

“I’m at least taking this shit seriously!”

“I’m on it, guys,” Pidge says, looking a bit uneasy when Keith casts her an annoyed look. She’s got schematics of the ship laid out and Hunk is bent over her shoulder, studying along with her. “Don’t you worry about it.”

Neither Keith nor Lance are even listening to her by this point, and Keith is no longer the only one glaring; Lance has sat up, and directed his full expression of annoyance in Keith’s direction.

“Oh, I forgot that we’re not allowed to ever have fun in space. My bad. Who invited you to be the party pooper police?”

Keith flushes angrily. “No one _hired_ me to do anything, I’m just here to get the job done. At least Hunk and Pidge are _trying_ to help. Meanwhile, you’re contributing jack shit!”

The words zing through the air like a grappling hook, and for a second it seems to hit his intended target. Something indefinable flickers in Lance’s eyes, causing the light inside of them to snuff out for a fraction of a second. It’s a blink and you miss it kind of reaction, because next thing Keith knows Lance is grinning again.

He turns to Hunk. “I think my fans will be called Lance-a-lots. Because they love Lance. A lot.”

Keith’s fingers twitch as if to strangle Lance before he’s even had the initial thought. “Would it kill you to take something seriously for two seconds?”

Lance turns back to Keith with a deftly amused expression on his face, as if he’d forgotten Keith was even here. “Would it kill you to take something lightly?”

“You’re obnoxious.”

“And you’re a tight ass. And the sky is blue. And space is black. Any other breaking news headlines we want to announce?”

“Guys!” Hunk says uneasily, shifting on his feet behind them. “Look, we’re stranded in this castle, why don’t we just try and get along for the foreseeable future…”

Keith’s lip curls. He should have known that whatever brain aneurysm he’d suffered to lead to a civil conversation with Lance would fly out the window as soon as it was over.

He storms out, seething.

\--

Maybe it’s that the lions are down. Maybe it’s the lack of immediate peril and excitement. Or maybe it’s just the mere fact that he has been in space for too fucking long without reprieve but whatever the reasons, Keith’s tolerance level for any and all Lance-related interactions hits an all time low.

It’s bad enough that they’re stuck in this dead zone, with no power, and limited food supplies. What makes it infinitely worse is the fact that Lance cannot seem to tone it down, not one bit. And by ‘infinitely worse’, Keith means that it’s driving him fucking crazy.

“I’m not eating this anymore,” Lance proudly announces, on their barely second day of eating rations, pushing his bowl away. “I’m sick of eating goop. I want pizza.”

“Yeah, we’ll get right on that. Anyone got a number for a local Domino’s on hand?” Keith responds, ready to tear Lance back down to reality before he lets his high horse take him anywhere else. He already knows how much Lance hates the food, but Lance’s complaining has reached whole new levels.

“It’s not ideal, I know,” Shiro says calmly, as he masterfully eats the goop without even wincing like the rest of the team. Even Coran looks miserable as he chows down. “But we need to conserve our strength.”

“Well, I give my strength to Hunk,” Lance says testily, dumping his bowl of goop into Hunk’s, who digs in. “Let me know when something better’s on the menu.”

“Do you enjoy being difficult as a general rule, or is a natural talent that you have to put like, zero effort into?” Already the skin underneath Keith’s jacket is prickling, tender, itching for a fight. It’s day five and they’ve been cooped up too long. But on the other hand, it’s not like there’s anything better to do. At this point, Keith is less irritated by Lance as he is irritated by the fact that no one seems to care about how absolutely obnoxious Lance is being.

Lance swivels around and sends a look over his shoulder. A blink-and-you-miss-it burst of clear blue in those eyes.

Then he winks. “Only for you, Keith. Only for you.”

 

\--

Pidge, because she’s a genius, because she’s _Pidge_ , comes up with a plan. They’re up to a week floating in the dead zone by this point, and while thankfully no disasters or life threatening situations have occurred, every uneventful day that passes is just another inch more of pushed luck. They can’t wait out the dead space in hopes that they’ll come out after a few short days. Uncharted space like this, there’s no predicting it. Not with their navigational systems down.

“I think we can get some energy out of the waste here in the castle,” Pidge says, over the mid morning ration. Her chatter is a welcome distraction from the fact that their food—while technically fresh and well prepared—really is starting to taste spectacularly disgusting, somehow more than before. “The crystal this castle runs on secretes a kind of mineral residue that—if gathered in large quantities and burned at the right heat—could produce a gas that we can manifest to use as like a booster type engine. It’ll help us restart the crystal, sort of a catalyst, for lack of a better word. Or like a really combustible jet pack that will eventually get us to an actual planet.”

“Is that… safe?” Allura raises a skeptical eyebrow.

“Oh it’s definitely likely to get us killed,” Hunk says with little to no ceremony. “But at this point, we haven’t got much else to go off on. Not even our lions are working. We got nothing.”

“So we gather that residue how?”

Hunk swallows a spoonful of gunk before responding. “By literally scraping it off the sides of the waste receptacle. Essentially dumpster diving. Gonna require a lot of elbow grease and a lot of sweat. But if we put in a solid week of effort we can hopefully have enough to boost us out of here.”

“And exactly how much dumpster substance are we looking to scrape off the bottom of the castle?”

“Half a metric ton, give or take,” Pidge says, glasses glinting as her eyes dart about. It’s only ever when Keith is standing next to her that he realizes just how small she is, and how young. She has the same measured calm of Shiro, headstrong enough that they can never tell when she’s doubting something. And if she is, she has no problems making it known. But she doesn’t seem to doubt her idea now, and that’s good enough for Keith to nod in agreement.

“Quick thinking,” Keith says, earning a fleeting smile in return.

“You’re not gonna think so when you see just how much work it’s gonna take to get this shit off the walls.” She sweats, holding the bowl of goop her lap. Held in her tiny hands, the ration almost looks larger than what would be the normal serving size, rather than half of it. “It’ll be worse than that time Matt and I had to scrape barnacles off our dad’s yacht in Cape Cod. Trust me. You’ll hate it.”

“It’s better than doing nothing,” Keith says, and Pidge raises her glass of water in toast to that, smirking slightly.

“Hey! Keith!” Lance plops down in the seat opposite him, interrupting what had actually been an enjoyable moment between he and a teammate.

Keith doesn’t even look up from his meal. “Hey, what.”

“Bet you can’t eat your ration faster than I can.” Lance is grinning, no real given explanation for the expression, probably just because he can. “First person to eat their ration and get down to the waste receptacle for mineral scraping wins.”

It’s bait. Keith knows it’s bait. Keith’s got no interest whatsoever in racing and even less interest in engaging with Lance’s competitive bullshit.

“If you don’t win,” Pidge points out, as if she’s reading the disinterest straight out of Keith’s mind, “then you’ll really never hear the end of it.”

It’s bait, and Lance is an overzealous over competitive idiot.

He rises to the occasion anyhow.

“You’re on.” Keith begins wolfing his food down in what is probably a sickening pace for everyone else in the room to view. Pidge makes a gagging noise and Keith grins around his goop. Lance may be the competitive one here, but Keith’s always been a pro at eating food fast, and running even faster.

(Sometimes he ate fast because he was worried that any unfinished bite would vanish if he left it alone for too long. Sometimes he ate fast because there was such an ache in his empty belly he didn’t know that there was even a way to assuage it. Other times it was because the bullies in school loved nothing more than taking their pickings of the smaller kids lunches, and he had no interest in being a part of that victim demographic.

And sometimes, it was just because. No one had ever taught Keith Kogane how to slow down and appreciate the smaller things in life. In the most metaphorical sense, he did not know how to slow down and smell the flowers.)

He slams down his spoon not thirty seconds later and is sprinting out of the room before he’s even swallowed. He can hear Lance shout angrily and toss the remainder of his ration at Pidge before he’s even finished and begin to run after Keith—but Keith’s already won. He allows himself to laugh as he runs, indulging in the exhilaration of play that he’d almost forgotten.

He’s feeling pretty full of himself when he reaches the site where Pidge wants them to start scraping, Lance huffing and cursing behind him. Keith slows to a jog, doubles back to lope alongside Lance.

“Aw, not so fast we, Lance?”

He gets a middle finger in return, and it almost makes him giddy, how easy it is to knock Lance down just a few pegs.

\--

Pidge was right. The work is bitter, and grueling, and all of them hate it in equal measures. By the second day of straight labor, they’re sore and barely awake except to eat their rations before passing out in the bunks. By the fifth day, they’re suffering from some pretty bad cabin fever, limited food consumption, and being tuned in to the 24/7 Lance’s Complaints, which is like broadcasting an air horn nonstop, but somehow infinitely more grating on Keith’s ears.

“Whoever said space was fun was full of it,” Lance groans, digging the chisel against the wall and scraping off the chalky quintessence residue into the bucket at their feet. “I want a refund.”

“You’ve already said that,” Keith says. He’d headed down here early after Lance started bitching about the rations and refusing to eat again out of sheer stubbornness. He’d also (foolishly) hoped Lance wouldn’t follow suit.

“And I’ll say it again,” whines Lance, brow furrowing as he chips at a rather large chunk of the mineral. “This. Fucking. Sucks.”

The mineral falls from the wall with a heavy clunk into the bucket and Lance plops down to wipe sweat from his brow, taking what feels like the fourth break in five minutes.

Keith inhales deeply, willing patience to enter where the ability to ignore cannot. They are, by natural instinct, at each other’s throats, for lack of a better expression. But normally, especially when they’ve got bigger enemies to fight, Lance is able to bite back his more bitter comments and Keith is able to direct his bouts of anger in more productive directions.

For some reason, though, the cabin fever they usually suffer from gets to them doubly. Keith can’t seem to _escape_ Lance, there’s no reprieve other than sitting here with the others and scraping mineral fucking residue off the fucking walls and hoping to high heaven that he doesn’t have a blackout and kill Lance in the process.

“Have you ever tried not talking?” Keith muses aloud, chiseling at another large chunk of mineral. “You’d probably save a lot of energy that way.”

“But then who would provide all the entertainment or commentary?”

“Somehow, I think we would survive without it,” Keith says evenly, careful to not let his tone get too out of sorts. They’ve got no idea how much longer they’ll be here. Food supply is short. Allura and Shiro are already worried and doing everything they can. The least Keith can do is not add fuel to the thickening fire by killing the Blue Paladin.

“Good news!” Coran chirps as they head up for their second ration of the day, exhausted and aching in their joints. “We’ve got enough food to last us a week if we ration it thoroughly enough.” He shakes a handwritten inventory sheet at them, like they’re supposed to be able to make sense of the Altean lettering. “I’ve done a recalculation, and it looks like we’ll actually have enough to stretch it a bit longer than we previously thought. Way longer, actually! Just enough to get power booted up and reach the nearest port for restock, as long as you don’t mind skipping breakfast.”

“Oh goodie. More goop,” Lance grumbles, not seeming amused by the ‘good news’ whatsoever. “Can’t _wait_.”

Inhaling deeply once more, Keith steels himself away from strangling Keith into decency. “Thanks for the update, Coran.”

One more week, maybe less if they gather enough of whatever dastardly concoction Pidge is cooking up. One more week, after which Keith plans to fly Red for at least a day straight, and eat nothing but new foods that he’s never once tasted before, no matter how disgusting they are.

One more week, and he can get the fuck away from Lance.

\--

They don’t starve, but the eating regiment they’re on isn’t exactly an all-you-can-eat buffet either. The team’s all in agreement, and together they begin skipping breakfast just as Coran suggested, and they get their rations in a singular mid-day meal that’s technically enough to sustain them. But regardless of nutrient level and caloric intake, hunger still scrapes long nails against the inside of Keith’s stomach, hardly at all satisfied with the bare minimum it’s received.

Hunger is an old and familiar sensation, threatening to drag Keith’s mind from the present to long-buried places. He’s lucky enough this time around that the hunger feels different, grounding even, because it’s a sensation he shares with other people. There’s a weird kind of bond to be had when one has nothing to do but bitching and complaining about just how hungry you are. As they slowly scrape away at this mineral waste, until their elbows and shoulders are sore with it, Keith finds himself listening to Pidge and Hunk and Shiro going back and forth about what they’re going to eat once the castle makes port. He even chimes in a few suggestions, which either get him booed or cheered depending on how out of left field they are.

It feels good to be a part of that, but he’s all too aware of Lance’s uncharacteristic quiet. Also aware of the fact that Lance has barely lifted a finger today, instead just leaning against the wall to make the occasional quip with the rest of the group.

Maybe it’s that Keith is usually the one on edge and ready to snap that makes him notice it. But there’s a weird sensation of turning tables as he realize that hunger has made pretty much everyone on the team cranky, even as they bitch and complain together. If it’s true that misery loves company, then it’s almost embarrassing how very ordinary Keith feels in this sort of environment. In fact, the only times his anger begins to prickle is when Lance opens his mouth.

He’s been blessed thus far today to not have to endure much Lance chatter. But the sixth time Lance quietly sits down to take a ‘break’, Keith can’t help it. He’s been chomping at the bit for far too long.

“You just can’t resist being a diva about everything, can you?” He means it as more of a joke than an actual insult, but the tone of his voice sounds harsh, and everyone in the room stills, even Allura straightening to her full height, her look at Keith not so admonishing as it is _what the fuck did you just say to your fellow paladin_.

“Keith.” Her voice sounds perfectly polite. That’s part of the reason why it’s so scary. “Lance. Why don’t the two of you see if we can find any remaining supplies in the bottom storage units of the castle, the old dungeons and sorts? I think I heard Coran say that if we found more food items we might be able to stretch our rations, or at least provide more meal variety.”

“Wait, there are _dungeons_ here?” Lance's eyes bug out of his head. “Why didn’t you tell us? We could have locked Keith up for being a buzzkill ages ago!”

“Or Lance for being an insufferable loudmouth,” Keith mutters. “Can’t I go with Pidge or Hunk?”

“My question exactly!” Lance tacks on.

“I think this task is exactly the kind of thing that you and Lance will be great at.” Allura beams, a steel in her eyes that suggests that Keith shouldn’t bother to protest, let alone dare to. “Get going! Shouldn’t take more than a few ticks!”

\--

It takes considerably longer than a few ticks, considering that the very bowels of the castle are a fucking labyrinth in and of themselves. They mostly pass the time by not talking and looking at every possible storage room and space that isn’t at each other. It works for a little bit, but then a little bit became a long while, and, well, apparently Lance can only go so long without talking before it starts to physically pain him.

“Jesus, it’s like a sauna down here.”

“The oxygen filtration system must not be as strong here.” Lance isn’t wrong. The air is soupy, Keith can feel it clinging to his skin, thicker than humidity, air laced with something ancient and stale. “C’mon, let’s keep looking.”

Lance groans, but falls in step beside Keith. They wander corridors and rooms, chambers that Keith supposes are supposed to be dungeons but really just look like spare bedrooms, the same bunker style arrangement that they’ve got in their own sleeping quarters. A castle this old, it’s bound to have tricks up its sleeve, trick passageways, hidey holes. He tests the panels along the wall, fingers probing and pressing, searching for grooves where the solid surface might give, but there’s nothing from what Keith can gather.

“You’d think they would have thought to stock up on rations, this being a castle and all.”

“It’s been a couple millennia since this baby’s been on duty,” Lance points out. “We’re not exactly driving a brand new model here. It’s like Allura said, we need to go grocery shopping.”

It takes a concentrated effort for Keith not to snort with laughter.

After a good half hour spent wandering around the bottom of the castle, both of them are steadily sweating, the unfiltered stuffy air stuffy now hot between their body heat and the rather cramped passageways. Tying his jacket about his waist, Keith sweeps what amount of his hair he back from his face, slipping a rubber band off his wrist with his teeth. He’d stolen it from Pidge’s hairbrush a few weeks back, but she hadn’t complained. Wasn’t like she needed it anyhow. He’s got just enough hair to gather into a small nub on at the crown of his head, a few strands too short to remain in place and falling back down against his cheeks.

He’s pulling the elastic around his hair for the final loop when he glances out from the corner of his eye.

Lance is staring at him.

“What?” Keith raises an eyebrow, but Lance just turns away, muttering something about a trick of the light and heading down the hallway.

“I swear to god if us trekking around down here in the fucking _catacombs_ triggers something so that this castle is haunted again I am _quitting_ Voltron. Retiring early. A man can handle being flung around in space but space ghosts? No thank you _sir_.”

“Shut up,” Keith mutters, more on reflex of feeling generally uncomfortable around Lance than an actual response. He doesn’t mean anything by it but Lance seems to take it and run with it like the goddamn Olympic torch.

“Oh, that’s right, I’m not allowed to express emotions when we’re on A Mission.”

“Did I say anything about expressing emotions? It’s not your emotions I have a problem with. It’s the fact that you can’t seem to help but narrate them out loud every time you have so much as a single thought. And it’s fucking annoying.”

“Oh, so now I’m annoying?” Lance stops walking in his entirety, arms crossed over his chest. He’s sweating as much as Keith, if not more, but he’s still got his jacket firmly on. “Any other insults you want to add to that list?”

“Sure. You want them categorized alphabetically or by shortest to longest?” Keith huffs, annoyed that he’s falling for the bait to fight over and over and over, like a fucking yo-yo effect. “Argh. Can we just get through one day without trying to kill each other?”

“Yeah, if you apologize.”

“Apologize!” Keith’s voice cracks, he’s so incredulous. Lance is actually the most ridiculous human being to exist, both on earth and in space. “Apologize for what?”

“For being a dick monkey!”

“I’m the dick monkey?” Keith can hardly believe he’s having to say these words out loud. “How am I the dick monkey when every time, every _goddamn time_ I try and play nice, you somehow manage to be incapable of saying thank you and leaving well enough alone. You just have to go and make everything, _everything_ into some bullshit competition. How am I the dick monkey when you’re pretty much useless!”

“Fine!” Lance’s face scrunches up, peevish. “You don’t want my help finding more rations? You’re on your own!”

“You weren’t even helping!” Keith fumes, irritation prickly on the back of his neck like a hot summer day in the dark of the castle.

The fact of the matter is that Keith’s never able to go from zero to a hundred the way he does with Lance. It’s like fiberglass on his skin, an itch that only gets worse the more you scratch.

He sucks in a lungful of air, ready to give Lance a piece of his goddamn mind, when Lance suddenly sidesteps, bumping into the wall, the mischief in his expression flickering.

What the hell?

“What are you doing?” Keith crosses his arms over his chest, watching Lance totter, hold a hand against the wall.

“Nothing, I’m fine! Worry about yourself!” Lance snaps, straightening instantly, like he’d forgotten they were fighting.

“Knock it off with the antics,” Keith snaps, just as Lance slides against the wall, falling to the floor.

And just like that, the fiberglass is gone.

“Lance?” Keith rushes forward. “What the fuck?”

Lance sways a bit like he’s drunk, stumbles over his words as Keith grips his shoulders. “Woah, talk about a headrush.”

His skin is damp with sweat, but his forehead is cold to the touch, pulse fluttering fast when Keith presses his fingers to it. He tries to shrug away from Keith, “M’fine. Just—”

“Just _fainted_. Quit struggling, hold still.” Keith checks his temperature. “It’s not a fever. When did you start feeling sick?”

“I told you I’m fine will you just—“ Lance’s eyes droop and then roll back in his head, “Just—”

He slumps against the wall again and Keith’s irritation turns to panic. He shouldn’t leave Lance on his own. They’re in the very bowels in the castle, and comms are down. Even hollering, it’s not likely anyone’s going to hear them.

“Goddammit, Lance, I could _kill you_ ,” Keith mutters.

He tries dragging Lance on his back, but Lance’s dead weight is something to be reckoned with, and his cool temperature does nothing to assuage Keith’s gnawing anxiety. It’ll take them way too fucking long to get back to the others.

“Shit.” Keith props Lance up against the wall and zips up his jacket, all the way up to his chin. After a moment’s thought, he unties his jacket and covers Lance with it. “No drowning in your own vomit. I’ll be right back, dumbass.”

When he was younger, and still too small for contact sports, Keith had joined track. Before he’d started training in martial arts at the Garrison, running was pretty much the only thing Keith was good at without question. Running felt natural to him, he was quick on his feet and the only thing you had to do to win at running was be quicker than the other people. He didn’t have to be bigger or smarter. He just had to be impossible to keep still, and well, that was pretty much a trait he’d been born with.

Like a fifty-yard dash, Keith takes off, tosses away his mind and emotions and gut clenching concern because he knows these will only weigh him down. He runs through the castle, elbows akimbo, legs burning. Up stairs and through passageways. Right until he barrels into the engineering room.

He doesn’t have to say anything. Allura and the others take one look at his face and come sprinting after him without a second’s hesitation.

It’s not a race.

He still gets to the finish line of Lance a good ten seconds ahead of the rest of them.

\--

Lance, for how much he loves attention, makes a big fuss about being carried to the infirmary once he comes to mid-trip, supported by the arms of his teammates. He also whines loudly and actually tries to march himself up on his own, but as it is, he doesn’t seem particularly equipped to walk without keeling right back over.

Keith, in a similar vein of big fusses, spends the entire walk to the infirmary berating Lance within an inch of his life for being such a goddamn pain in his ass, to the point where Allura says, “Stand down, Keith,” in a dark tone that suggests he better not dare disobey.

He backs down, but doesn’t leave the room, rather stands behind Lance’s shoulder to hover. Coran and Allura check Lance’s vitals with unrecognizable medical equipment, both donning grave expressions. It’s impossible to get a read on either of them, which only ratchets Keith’s irritation higher. Especially as Lance lies there cracking jokes with Hunk and Pidge, as if he had stubbed his toe rather than fallen unconscious. Even Shiro joins in to respond to a few of Lance’s quips, but all Keith can do is stand there, arms crossed tight over his chest and staring daggers into the back of Lance’s head. Directing his quiet anger into a specific point of vision helps, especially when he feels like he’s about to snap apart without understanding why.

“What’s the verdict?” Shiro asks, after a short bout of whispering between Coran and Allura, looking over the tools they’d been applying to Lance’s limbs and exterior.

“Simple fix. He’s severely malnourished. Likely dehydrated, too,” Coran answers.

It’s impossible to miss the odd image of Lance flushing, ducking his head down as if _embarrassed_. Keith didn’t think anything embarrassed Lance, other than cute girls and being outsmarted by them.

Shiro presses forward, gently concerned. “When exactly was the last time you ate, Lance?”

“I dunno. I was there for all the meals, wasn’t I? Maybe? Huh. Must’ve been too busy helping find a way to get the ship up and running.” Lance shrugs, making himself more comfortable on the pillows they’ve propped him against.

No one seems to take that news particularly well. Coran subscribes bed rest for and full meals. Given that they’ll be moving and out of the dead zone soon, they can afford the foot shortage. And with that done, Allura barks a few orders, and Pidge and Hunk get back to fixing the ship with Coran. Shiro offers to stay behind but it’s Keith who steps in for babysitting duty. He doesn’t plan on letting this idiot out of his sight. When the room is cleared, he turns around and lands a jabbing punch on Lance’s shoulder.

“Ow!” he yelps. “What the hell was that for?”

“Are you… _starving yourself_?” Keith raises a threatening fist again, glowering.

“Nah, man. We had rations! I just forgot to eat a few times, ain’t no big thing!”

But it is. It is a big thing. The rations were small enough to begin with. There’s no logical explanation for how Lance could conveniently forget to eat. Keith’s mind races to all the possible options of _why the fuck_ Lance would not be eating other than a sheer lack of brain cells but he comes up with nothing. If Lance weren’t already weak Keith would probably be kicking his fucking ass.

“Look,” Lance breaks in, “I’ll eat some goop and be back on my feet in a jiffy, alright? And we can all forget this little incident.” He makes to get up, swings his legs over the side of the cot.

“What are you—sit _down,_ dumbass.” Keith slams a hand down on his shoulder and shoves him Lance back. They struggle, but it’s telling when Lance gives in all too easily, collapsing back against the pillows, and smiles as if the whole situation was amusing.

“Dude, I’m _fine_.”

“I’ll believe that when I see it.”

And Lance is, technically, fine. Keith knows this. He _knows_ this. Coran confirmed it.

It doesn’t stop him from taking a seat and glaring hard enough at Lance that Lance, to his credit, actually looks a bit scared.

A little while later, Coran comes dashing back with some food for Lance, and Shiro and Allura with the news that the engine is almost ready to fire up and propel them the hell out of there.

“You should thank Keith, Lance,” Allura says evenly. “He got help right after you collapsed.”

“You make it sound so heroic,” Lance says. “I very specifically recall him _dropping_ me to run and get you guys.”

“The Princess does have a point,” Shiro adds.

Lance looks between the three of them and opens his mouth to protest, but settles with a sign and grumble. “Fine. Thanks for leaving my lifeless body in the hallway and running to get help, I guess.”

“Try harder, why don’t you.” Allura’s no longer asking.

Lance looks at Keith for a solid beat, like he’s not quite sure he’s decided Keith deserves it.

“Thank you, Keith.”

It’s not the statement Keith was expecting, mostly because Lance saying thank you for any sort of thing feels like an anomaly rather than a norm. Certainly not the more sincere cadence he would have expected. Even if it’s grudging, the fact that Lance says the words at all throws Keith off guard so he’s helpless but to mutter back a stilted, “Uh, you’re welcome,” back.

Allura and Shiro share a knowing look that he doesn’t understand, nor like, not one fucking bit. He picks up the spoon and a bowl of goop, pointedly ignoring the eyes of everyone, and sits in front of Lance. Strangely enough, at this moment, dealing with Lance feels like the only thing he can do right now, without feeling weird and awkward like he was caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

“Open up the tunnel, here comes the train, motherfucker.” Like a swordsman, Keith sees his opening in Lance’s indignant protest and takes it, shoving a spoonful directly into his mouth and forcing his jaw shut.

“You’re going to sit here, you’re going to eat this fucking goop, and you’re not going to _fucking move_ until you’ve consumed every single bite in this bowl. Got that?” He shoves another spoonful in Lance’s face, daring him to protest.

Thankfully, he doesn’t. Sure, they bicker and argue, the others get tired of the bickering and arguing and leave, but Keith doesn’t have to resort to force-feeding again, and Lance doesn’t complain beyond mild whining. Which is, if anything, a reassurance that some things never change, even in the face of peril.

With each bite comes a piece of realization to string together all of the smaller antics in this thoroughly exhausting week: Lance bitching about not liking the food, Lance tricking Keith into eating competitions, Lance claiming to be full and giving his food to Pidge, or Hunk, who’d wanted it more. Lance, not partaking for a second in the team bonding via bemoaning how hungry they all were.

Lance had been lying. Lying straight through his teeth, pretending to throw diva fit after diva fit and letting everyone else around him take his food.

And that… that wasn’t the Lance he knew. The Lance he knew would have boasted about being a hero, about being the one to take the fall while the others soldiered bravely onward.

The Lance Keith knew would have given up his food, only to never let anyone forget what a fucking sacrifice he made.

Long after the prescribed full meal had been fed, the bowl of goop scraped clean, and Lance drowsing off, it occurs to Keith that he might not really know Lance at all.

Something fetid and frantic burrows into his belly, the beginning pangs of guilt, making his feet restless, bouncing where they poise on the floor.

Why’d he do it? Keith drags a hand over his face. He’s loathe to be caught staring at the now sleeping Lance, mouth open and drooling, but no one walks in to witness it. There are hollows under Lance’s eyes that speak to nights of not sleeping. Likely from hunger pangs, Keith realizes, with another aborted surge of guilt low in his stomach. He’d know best, as those same pangs punctuated Keith’s existence like an imaginary friend, never admitted to but always present.

He shouldn’t have done it. It was stupid and reckless and it offered no huge help to the team that Keith could see.

Huffing in frustration, Keith stalks out of Lance’s room to the training center, the beginnings of a headache starting to pound in earnest against his skull. Understanding the motivations for why Lance does anything is starting to feel like an exercise in futility.

When he wakes the next morning, his quads burn every time he moves, a soreness that draws more attention and grimacing than he’s used to.

It’s been a long time since he’s run that hard.

\--

They weren’t all bad for living in, the foster homes. It was rare, but some were even enjoyable, offering comfort that felt like a luxury, a temporary reprieve from what felt like the coiled spring inside Keith that kept him vigilant. He has a few sparse memories, scattered across years and locations that come to mind when he thinks of the good ones: certain meals, kindnesses. Playing in sprawling backyards with other foster siblings—through rain and snow. A beaten up old couch that was somehow better to sleep on than his own bed. A staircase railing that was great for sliding down.

Most prominent above all, though, was the bookshelf in the foster home Keith stayed in on the cusp of his eleventh birthday. His then-foster mother—Miss Josie, a woman with brown skin and sharp eyes that didn’t let her kids get away with any sort of nonsense—was a professor of literature at the local community college. Books could usually be found on every which surface area of the house, but they usually belonged in the study where Miss Josie worked, on the long shelves that stretched around the entire space of the wall, curving along the shape of it.

Still quite some time away from his growth spurt, and therefore hopelessly inept at anything physical, Keith read avidly. He snuck into Miss Josie’s study on most days after school, did his homework with his back propped against the shelves, occasionally sneaking peaks at books, looking up the meanings of words, curious despite the fact that none of the them were supposed to play in the study.

But as much as he loved reading, Keith loved hearing Miss Josie read more. She had a melodic and theatrical voice, the kind that boomed when she laughed, or cracked when she was stern. It was never Keith that requested reading time each night; that privilege was usually saved for the little ones, with eyes wide open and thumbs in their mouths. He can’t remember their names anymore, even though there were only two, but their fidgety excitement as Miss Josie picked a story to read each night was impossible to forget.

She worked them through Grimm’s Fairy Tales and stories by Hans Christian Anderson. Keith never actively participated, never asked to see the pictures, never even made requests like the kids did. He just hovered in the doorway, listening intently, sometimes sitting and leaning against the threshold and listening to magic unfurl in the worlds of princesses and little match girls alike.

But then one night, the little ones wanted a new story. One they’d never heard before. And so Miss Josie pulled down a small book with a drawing of a boy standing on a planet in space. All by himself.

 _Le Petit Prince_ , the story was called. Miss Josie read along in both English and French, alternating between the two, weaving the tale of a boy who traveled from asteroid to asteroid.

Most nights, Keith was content to sit on the floor, leaned against the doorframe with his legs stretched across, listening with eyes closed. But the Little Prince wandering from home to home had him rapt with attention, an ache in his chest that did not yet have a name as Miss Josie told the story.

_“’What does that mean—'tame'?’_

_“‘It is an act too often neglected," said the fox. ‘It means to establish ties.’_

_“'To establish ties'?”_ Miss Josie’s voice parted the air and Keith was helpless but to listen. The words passed through him like bullets until he was riddled with them, without knowing why.

_"…To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world . . ."_

What did it mean? Keith wondered, almost wanting to rush forward and grab the book from Miss Josie’s hands, read it for himself to see if she was just making it up. A fox was a wild animal. It belonged to no one. It couldn’t be tamed. And yet…

And yet the boy loved the fox, and that made all the difference in the world. Even then Keith could have called that for the stupid move it was.

_“So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the hour of his departure drew near—_

_“‘Ah,’ said the fox, ‘I shall cry.’_

_“‘It is your own fault,’ said the little prince. ‘I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you . . .’_

_“‘Yes, that is so,’ said the fox._

_“‘But now you are going to cry!’ said the little prince._

_“‘Yes, that is so,’ said the fox.”_

Is this what became of wild things? Did they become tamed only to be abandoned all over again?

There was no forgetting it, that haunting moral. _You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed._

Keith didn’t want anyone to have to be responsible for him. He didn’t want anyone to leave first. His mom had already seen to that.

Miss Josie finished the story. Kissed them all on their cheeks. The little ones went to sleep. Later that night, Keith snuck back downstairs and stayed up all night reading it over again. He cried bitterly when the boy left the fox, fat sloppy tears that fell in splats on the page. And then when it was over he tucked the book back on the shelf and crept back to bed, and no one ever suspected a thing.

By the end of the next week he’d pulled the fire alarm twice and gotten into another fight with the bullies at school. He was relocated to a new home with more fit circumstances by the week after that, one that was noisy and way more cramped. There was no bookshelf. The foster parents were always too tired to read bedtime stories.

It was better this way.

\--

There’s an adrenaline rush that comes after battle for the entire team. It’s somehow always the most awake Keith ever manages to feel, that rush. The rest of them crash when it hits in their own ways. Hunk usually eats enough dinner for three and then promptly falls asleep on the nearest flat surface. Pidge usually gets some kind of genius idea for a new invention, and falls asleep on her schematics, halfway through jotting it down. Shiro usually meditates, which Keith imagines helps, because he’s pretty sure that spiked adrenaline wakes something in Shiro that he doesn’t want stirring.

Even Coran and Allura, though they are typically not the ones in battle, feel the effects of the mission. Coran usually says something about ‘dropping off for a few ticks’ on the bridge, and Allura often begins to say she is going to go converse with her father before she stops herself, the corners of her mouth dipping down.

They all cope with that crash in their own ways. Keith rides it out like a junkie. Strung out and already tickling for the next high, the next time he won’t feel so goddamn tired.

He can remember the first time he rode in a fighter jet, back at the Garrison. How the g-force had made the rest of his team sick to their stomachs the first time, a few even passing out in the cockpit. Keith not only flew without mishap. He stayed awake for two days afterwards and all he could think about, all he could envision every time he closed his eyes, was getting that motion back again.

So the rest of the team crashes. Keith enjoys the silence they leave behind, allows himself a little more enjoyment of the ship at leisure than he usually does.

But then, not every mission goes according to plan. That is to say, not every mission ends well.

Keith watches his teammates out of the corner of his eye. Hunk wiping his face on his sleeve. Pidge white as a sheet, staring at her schematics, her pencil unmoving. Coran doesn’t bid anyone adieu. Shiro, looking hopeless, does what he can to assure everyone that they did their best, but even he looks like he’s having a hard time convincing himself. When he goes to the meditation room, Allura goes after him.

They try and save what planets and civilizations they can. But they are not always as resilient and hopeful as the Balmera had been. Sometimes, as often as not, Zarkon’s armies have laid waste to a way of life that cannot be salvaged, no matter how hard they try.

Sometimes a mission ends, and they’re too late to play the heroes.

There are some things, Keith knows, that you cannot save. But he’s more at home with that fact than the others are, has had more time to accept it then them. He knows it bothers them more than him, the impact longer lasting, lingering more in the air of the Castle.

He sits against the console of the sky deck, watching as stars zoom by in colorful streaks, the hyperspace whizzing by. It’s the first time he realizes that the crash of his teammates, the vomiting, the sleeping, is the normal reaction to have in this type of situation.

But then, Keith has never been normal. For the longest time, he had lived like he was asleep. Miles away from everyone else, affected by nothing because if it was all a dream, then what was the goddamn point of caring when you would wake up eventually, when the dream was bound to end eventually. When the dream didn’t even matter anyway.

He had lived like that, for a while. And then one day, Keith had woken up out of the muck of it all kicking and screaming. One day, he heard the orders being given to try one flight maneuver or another and instead of complying, just like he always fucking did because it was a dream and nothing mattered, Keith thought _how about I don’t_ and like a bucket of ice water had been dumped on him, was dragged into the living and caring world, and hating every second of it.

He knew, above all else, he had a temper that stoked as easily as embers, one that caught like brush in a drought. For the longest time he’d thought it had come out of a survival instinct, a subconscious and undeniable urge to live. But the more it sits with him, the more times he blows up, Keith realizes that much of his anger, much of his outbursts, stem from simply wanting to be left the hell alone.

Footsteps round he corner before Keith has the opportunity to slip away unnoticed.

“Hey Hunk—oh.” Lance’s mouth opens and closes for a few moments. “Sorry, I thought.”

“I was Hunk, yeah I know,” Keith says. “Sorry to disappoint.”

“I wasn’t—” Lance cuts off, like he’s stifling a comment before it gets too nasty. The air hasn’t turned sour yet. “Just sit back down, alright? I don’t bite.”

“Maybe I do.”

The corner of Lance’s lips twitch. “Nah, something tells me you’re a regular old softie. I’m not scared of you.”

As if that settles the threat of an argument, Lance settles down on the floor, legs crossed, leaning back on his palms as he stares outside.

“Your hair used to be short, didn’t it?” Lance asks, and Keith’s hand immediately jumps to flatten his bangs; self conscious.

It feels trivial, trying to explain the meaning behind such a small and frivolous act of rebellion. For sixteen years of his life Keith had had a military style cut. It was easier maintenance for the unfortunate families who were shouldered with the burden of caring for him, less hassle as a whole.

The truth was, Keith had short hair for sixteen years, and then one day he simply decided to grow it out.

(The truth was: Captain Takashi Shirogane was declared missing in action on the Kerberos Mission. The truth was: the top fighter pilot in the Galaxy Garrison got kicked out 24 hours after. The truth was: it got easily dirty and sweaty in the desert, but every single centimeter of hair grown out felt like a fuck you to anyone who thought he belonged to them. The truth was: it was harder to recognize the face staring back at him in the mirror.

The truth was: he preferred it that way.)

“Used to be, yeah. Whenever I moved, I always got a haircut. Easier to take care of, I guess,” Keith answers, the words sounding stilted and obvious on his tongue, glaringly false.

The notion of Lance remembering anything about Keith and what he was like Before Voltron makes the back of his neck prickle with guilt. He hadn’t even registered Lance’s general existence until Lance had barreled right into his rescue attempt of Shiro, and even then it wasn’t until fairly recently that Keith would be able to tell you anything about what Lance actually looks like.

That Lance would remember Keith, given their apparently infamous competition, is no surprise. That Keith wouldn’t even recognize Lance, let alone be able to tell if Lance looks different from when Keith first met him, is. Keith is many many unflattering things, but an asshole isn’t one of them.

“Why’d you ask?” He looks now, though, a long side-glance that’s missed by Lance, who’s staring out at the stars again. Takes in the brown skin and hair, the golden glow of them as if stitched straight from the sun. That stubborn chin. The curious twist of that crooked mouth. Keith wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Lance hadn’t changed one bit since the first time they met.

In all honesty, he can’t even explain how he’d managed to miss a smile like Lance’s the first time around. So yeah, maybe Keith is an asshole too, on top of all other flaws.

Lance smiles, like he’s sharing a secret. “Just curious. It looks better on you. Like this. You look more…” He makes a vague gesture at the air. “Like you.”

“That doesn’t even make sense,” Keith responds. His mouth feels dry. The comment burrows into his skin, and he’s cautious and unsure of the feeling it produces. Compliments from Lance always have a way of feeling back handed to Keith, and he doesn’t know why.

“Than clearly you haven’t been paying attention.” Lance grins, squinting playfully. “I’ve got you all figured out, Keith Kogane. You’re not as much as a mystery as you think.”

“And you’re not as smart as you think,” Keith shoots back. “Swooned at all, lately?”

Lance throws a punch at Keith’s shoulder that isn’t half as hard as it could have been, and Keith catches himself smiling, long after Lance has walked off to bed.

\--

It’s not stalking, what Keith is doing.

He prefers to think of it as “Stupid Patrol”, a.k.a. Make Sure Lance Doesn’t Get Into Trouble Patrol, a.k.a. Follow Lance Around Everywhere Without Him Knowing Patrol.

Okay. So maybe it’s stalking too. But it’s for Lance’s own _good_. Keith isn’t about to let him go find some other way to get himself to killed.

Hours trickle to days to weeks spent watching Lance. They’re in another slump by way of life-threatening peril, which saves Keith from getting stress ulcers, at the very least. And more or less allows Keith to keep a close eye on the party of interest.

To Keith’s utter lack of surprise, Lance is superficially selfish about many things. About shower time, about attention, about getting the best seat on the sky deck when the team sits and stargazes together. That, Keith thinks, is typical Lance behavior. That, at the very least, seems to be well and in place.

Until Pidge, yawning and exhausted after a long diagnostics run of the castle, comes to curl up on the couch next to Lance and Lance moves to the floor, offering her his blanket.

Until Hunk admits he hates combat training with the simulator and Lance offers to spar with him, coming away with bruises and a fat lip.

Until, one night, Keith pads into the kitchen for a midnight snack, and Lance wordlessly pushes his own bowl of goop over for him to help himself to.

It drives Keith crazy. There’s no making sense of when Lance is going to do something Just-Like-Lance and when he’s going to do something Not-At-All-Like Lance. Keith is halfway to forming some insane conspiracy about a hidden, much nicer, twin who switches places with the real Lance whenever Real Lance wants a break. Keith has memorized Lance’s schedule and routine down to a T, and yet the actual patterned behavior of Lance remained as elusive and impossible to decipher as Altean texts.

So, until things make sense, until _Lance_ makes sense, Keith watches closely.

Keith can’t sleep. This is par for the course of any other night, except now, as Keith lies tossing and turning, staring up at the ceiling, he finds his mind wandering down the hallway, into the kitchen, wondering if anyone might be up and puttering about in the kitchen. Not that Keith needs them to be, not even that he _wants_ them to be. He just wanders about it, in an offhand, distanced, completely aloof sort of way.

Keith can’t sleep, but for the first time it’s not because he’s weirded out by sleeping in space.

He tugs on a shirt, dismissing the solid three seconds he considers going shirtless down the hallway, as if anyone actually cared. He wanders into the kitchen and ignores the tiniest itch of disappointment, turns back to his nightly wandering of the castle as he goes about his business. He tells himself that’s why he heads down to the lion paddocks. He needs air. Needs exercise.

He’s surprised when he almost walks in on Lance in the middle of a maintenance session, and then not surprised at all.

Lance has a connection with his lion that seems to redefine Man’s Best Friend as being a Mechanical Feline rather than an actual dog. Sure, Lance had found his lion before anyone else, had basically discovered his part of Voltron before anyone else, but even after months of flying around space, hours testing aerodynamics, speed, agility of his lion, Keith couldn’t bring himself to muster even a third of the absolute nurturing attitude that Lance had taken towards his lion.

But then, as Keith has already begun to notice, Lance more or less adopted a nurturing attitude towards pretty much everyone. He was just better at hiding it when the things he nurtured weren’t an emotionless robot lion. Go figure.

Keith also feels like a bit shady as he peers around the corner to watch the progress, but it’s somewhere in the early am of the morning and it’s not like he has much else to do. It’s simple curiosity. Like scientists study apes as they eat bugs off another. That’s all this was.

He watches Lance work, fine turning wires and oiling gears and buffing away scratches from space particles that dinged against the fine metal. He doesn’t get why he’s so unnerved until he’s realized that Lance isn’t _talking_ , the usual idiotic quips and cocky attitude settled into something quiet and focused, all easy smiles and comedic energy tampered down into this. There’s a slight crease in his brow, and the quiet of the room is punctuated only by a low hum each time Lance gets a scratch out, a whistle as he reaches for the toolbox.

On one hand it’s probably the most tolerable Keith has ever found Lance. On the other, it sets off an entirely uneasy feeling in Keith’s gut that he doesn’t quite know how to pick apart. Keith knows every emotion he’s ever felt towards Lance to be somewhere on the spectrum between indifference and extreme annoyance. This is… decidedly not that.

“Easy girl,” Lance mutters, pulling at a wrench and tightening a lug nut. He’s got grease on his arms as he straightens and wipes the sweat off his forehead and it occurs to Keith that there’s nothing skinny or funny-looking about Lance. Nothing at all.

\--

So Keith is human. Notices things like attractive bodies. It’s biology. It’s atoms responding to the presence of other atoms. He’s got nothing to be ashamed of.

But he carries this newfound awareness of Lance like a fresh wound. Protecting it, careful not to expose it to the air around him. Terrified of infection, spreading to every part of him in bittersweet agony.

He knows that eventually he’ll have to deal with it. But for now it’s tender, vulnerable. It makes him weak. He hates it.

But how do you destroy a feeling when it’s knitted into the marrow of you? How do you put to rest an affinity for someone’s eyes, the shape of their mouth when they smile?

You kill it dead. You throw dirt in the wound and you soldier onward and cauterize it while it’s still fresh, still tender, before it gets infected, before it permeates your every breath, the sickly sweet rotting of a broken heart.

No time for stitches and natural healing on this battlefield.

Keith decides that it isn’t too healthy to spend all of his time watching one member, and rather resigns himself to watching all of them. It’s usually the position he resigns himself to when entering a new environment, sussing out the threats, seeing who’s trustworthy, who to steer clear from. He thought he’d had his team figured out by now, but as he’s learning from one Paladin in particular, this is not necessarily the case.

Growing up had been a haze for the longest time, the blur of group homes and foster homes, of faking smiles and acting like the luckiest kid in the world to join the Galaxy Garrison. He was good at flying, the skill being a stroke of dumb luck. He hadn’t felt lucky, not really. Just tired of being shuffled around from one place to the next until the world found somewhere he could be useful, and not just a burden, and a waste of space.

He can remember being asked why he wanted to join the Garrison, and had spouted all this bullshit about honor and truth and exploring new worlds, partially believed it all too. But the truth was he didn’t want anything, at least that’s how it felt.

The truth is he was a boy who had tried living in every corner of the earth, and figured he should try on space for size. It had just felt like the right place to be.

(Besides, you didn’t get into the army by admitting out loud that you dreamt of stars and perpetual silence. Of being so far away that belonging anywhere, belonging to anyone, didn’t matter.)

The point is, everyone’s got their way of coping with their own darkness. The loneliness that stalks Keith—that dark twisted and inescapable thing that crawls into his bed and wraps talons around his throat whenever he strays too far away—he keeps that at bay by running from it. If his body can be busy, can be moving, then it will abate. But the more he watches his teammates interact and go about, learning from one another and leaning on each other for support, the more he understands a thing or two that he didn’t before.

Their isms and their quirks, are all just part of the routine, a comfort Keith had never prepared himself to get used to. There are things that help. There’s light that pushes back at the dark.

There is Shiro and his kind encouragement, the very presence of him grounding and invigorating.

There is Allura and her clipped accent, always in their ears, commanding, and demanding, in her endlessly hopeful tone.

There is Coran and his inane knowledge of the universe, always popping up with a cheery factoid.

There is Hunk’s perpetual joking about food or pop culture, a weird inane sense of humor that consists of memes and cartoonish faces that always leaves Keith laughing, even when he least feels like it.

There is Pidge, smaller than all of them with twice as much fire. Sometimes Keith looks at her and wonders what the hell the army was thinking when they recruited her brother and left her behind.

There is comfort to be taken in knowing all of them, his teammates.

Only one seems to unwind him the more he knows, perplex him the more he understands.

Lance. All gangly limbs and sly smiles. Tacky like glue, he holds everyone together and pulls them tight with his charisma as much as he annoys the shit out of them. He seems to exist in a Jekyll & Hyde mythos, and there’s no projecting which one you’ll run into. Lance. The name alone makes Keith have two simultaneous urges to throw something and to smile to himself.

It’s with an almost attack-like ferocity that he throws himself into the missions, the work. He engages with his teammates. He makes a point to avoid Lance while simultaneously keeping scarily close tabs on him. Allows himself the small guilty pleasure of observation while tamping down every single instinct. For just a bit, he starts to feel like that wound has closed up successfully, nerves deadened, no feeling left in the scar that’s left. It’s a slipshod mess for a getting over a feeling, but it works. He dutifully serves and pays attention to his teammates and he convinces himself that any and all feelings for a certain blue paladin have ebbed away.

It goes well.

Until it goes to complete shit.

\--

At this particular moment in time, Keith can’t really say _whose_ fault it is. He just knows that as it stands, they’re all dead.

“You know. I liked it better when we were dealing with tiny angry Arusians,” Hunk says uneasily, as they raise their hands in surrender. “These guys don’t look half as harmless.”

He’s right. The telepaths are tall, taller than any human Keith has ever seen, with eyes the color of milk: no iris, no pupil, just unblinking opaque white.

The telepaths keep filing into the cave, bipedal like men, but with naked torsos and limbs twisted and distorted as if made of gnarled vines. They don’t look harmless at all. In fact, quite the opposite.

Honestly _fuck_ Allura. And Shiro. And Coran. There’s going to be hell to pay when they get out of this.

If. If they get out of this. Keith amends his previous thought.

It had all seemed very harmless and straightforward just a few hours ago, Allura’s eyes _shining_ with excitement as they hovered over F’destris, a planet that had once been in alliance with Altea. They’d appeared to be uncolonized by the Galra, the first planet untouched in several galaxies, and so Allura had practically marched them off the ship to forge an envoy of peace, and make contact. Coran went along as a historical expert, Shiro as the representative of Voltron, and Allura of course as the throne’s sole living heir.

In the rush to make contact—the enthusiasm bubbling over in Allura’s eyes as she extolled the virtues of the F’destrians, an ancient race from times before verbal languages—they really hadn’t planned for things to go south. The F’destrians were peaceful, she’d explained, strapping on her armor with Shiro beside her. They were a valuable ally, one that communicated with their minds rather than their mouths, and if she could win them to their side and convince them of Voltron’s return, it would mark a victory in the war.

Keith should have protested being left behind with the remainder of the team while the ‘grownups’ went to go have fun. As it was, no fun was really had. Communications turned out to be ineffective in the heavy grey atmosphere of F’destris, meaning that they had no way of really knowing what was going on. A few hours uneasily slipped by with no return or word, but the team followed their orders to stay put.

Or at least, tried to.

Somewhere between the promise of a quick visit and now, Allura, Shiro and Coran had yet to come back. Somewhere between Allura swearing they’d be back in a few ticks and now, they’d gone and found themselves in a whole heap of trouble.

All it took was a few flipped coins and games of rock paper scissors to make the decision, and before you could say ‘quiznak’ they—that is, Hunk, Keith, Lance and Pidge—had gone and crammed themselves into one of the shuttle bay jets and gone down to F’destris. It was their intent to land in a cave so as not to attract attention, but it didn’t matter what precautions they took. Turns out the local natives hadn’t been living in their own castle after all. They’d been living underground, and Lance had gone and landed his jet right on the welcome mat of their front door. It was just their luck that hospitality had come out almost the second they’d turned the jet engine off, disarming and arresting the four of them. Within moments it became clear that Allura and Shiro and Coran were not in trouble, they were: weaponless, lionless, and defenseless. No idea where the others were or are.

The telepaths had been so quiet it was like they materialized out of thin air, vapor-forming bodies. They’d been surrounded and outnumbered, and the F’destrians had weapons, blades and knives that gleamed like hungry smiles in the moonlight. Fighting wasn’t an option, not with those odds. The team, minus their leaders, was taken prisoner in silence.

Truth be told, things have been better for the Paladins.

“Don’t worry,” Keith says to Hunk, forcing down the bitter doubt welling inside him. “Allura said they were allies. They’re probably just scared. We’ll work it out.”

He hopes to god it’s true.

They’re taken to a room deep in the surface of the planet, long winding tunnels that slope downwards, dark enough that Keith can’t see a damn thing, only hears Hunk hissing when Lance treads on his toe, feels the press of Pidge as she unconsciously bumps her shoulder against his arm, tense. They’re fumbling in the dark following the telepaths one second and then the next they’re in a tightly compact room, as if no hallway had existed in the first place. Dim lights and vents circulate damp musty air.

The Paladins and telepaths stare at each other for a beat, the silence palpable, the air tense. Keith tips forward on the balls of his feet, clenching a fist, ready for a fight if they come at them swinging.

Just like Coran had mentioned, the F’destrians have no mouths, but they don’t need them. Words wind their way into Keith’s mind like smoke, curling around him, the sound of overheard whispers in his ear. It’s not like hearing someone speak and being able to tune them out; he can’t not hear them, impossible to block out because he hears the words inside himself, sensations that form images that form meaning, on a gritty pixelated chalkboard in his mind.

 _Who are you?_ The voice is ancient, pulling at the marrow of him, unsettling all the hairs on the back of Keith’s neck, the age of these beings so great that it crawls under his skin. _State your planet of origin and mission._

It’s Lance that steps forward first after a moment of hesitancy from the group, raising his chin in a way Keith hopes is respectful rather than condescending. “We’re from the planet Earth. We seek lost allies to the planet Altea, on behalf of Princess Allura.”

In all actuality, they were just wandering around on what was supposed to be an abandoned planet, and thereby trespassing. But semantics didn’t seem pertinent to mention at the moment.

_You speak of impossible things. There is no Altea._

Lance rallies quickly. “That’s true. The planet was destroyed, but some survived. We are friends of Princess Allura, and we come in peace.” He somehow manages to turn just slightly and wink in their direction, like the cliché is somehow funny. Again, Keith is nearly torn apart with the dual urge to laugh and throw something at once.

It doesn’t last long. The telepaths are speaking and obliterating any distractions.

_The Altean empire was wiped out by Zarkon ten thousand years ago. You are lying._

Lance falters a split second too long, and so Keith steps forward. He angles his body, molds himself like he did all those years introducing himself to the bigger kids on the playground, the submissive non-threatening stance that went against the very core of him.

“I know it doesn’t look like it. But we are the Paladins of Voltron. Friends of Princess Allura of Altea. Well, the new Paladins, at least. We want to save your planet. We want to help you.”

_Did the Galra send you here?_

“We’re fighting the Galra.” Keith forces himself to keep huffing in frustration. “We’re trying to help the Universe, not destroy it. If you would just—“

_Do you really think you’re the first that has come here asking for help, little intruder?_

“Uh.” Now it’s Keith’s turn to falter. Because it’s fast becoming clear that they weren’t prepared for shit. “Yes?”

_For millennia we have avoided conflict with the Galra. We do not take sides, but our own. Anyone who lands on the planet is killed. But if there are more of you out there, and if you are working for a larger power, then you will tell us._

“You can’t read our minds,” Keith snaps, now smug to have one piece of upperhand knowledge. “You won’t be able to see inside our thoughts.”

A pause. Hunk and Pidge and Lance shift closer to Keith, as if their presence alone will shield him from whatever’s coming next.

_Reading you is not necessary. Not when we can make you see and hear whatever we please. For as long as we please._

Another wave of goose bumps over the back of Keith’s neck. He senses rather than sees the telepath sweep the room with those milky eyes, scanning over them, a brief and pregnant moment of contemplation.

 _Take that one,_ the one telepath says, and Keith can’t track their eye movements but he knows they mean Pidge. _That one is young. It will break easier._

“No!” Hunk moves in front of Pidge without a second of hesitation, but one crackle from the tasers and he’s cowered on the floor, wracked with electrical tremors. Keith moves, but if Hunk isn’t enough to be a barrier, than he’s nothing. The telepaths knock him aside with a quick spark of the tasers and send him sprawling. In no time flat they’ve got Pidge in an iron grip, dragging her kicking and swearing up a storm. None of them are big enough or strong enough to protect her, Keith realizes. And she’s too small for her dead weight to be an obstacle at all.

“What? Her? You think she’s gonna know anything?” The voice that breaks the struggling grunts and panicky sounds of Pidge is loud enough that for a second the whole room stops, all heads turning towards Lance, who’s standing there wide eyed, like his own outburst surprised even him.

_If it doesn’t, then we shall kill it. And you shall be next._

Pidge snarls like a wildcat, but Keith sees the fear in her eyes.

“Our boss won’t like that very much. You might want to rethink that. Besides.” Lance sneers at Pidge. “She is useless to you. She knows nothing.”

Keith’s hand darts out and snags at Lance’s sleeve, pulling him close.

“What are you doing?” He wants to strangle Lance, actually strangle him. “They’ll kill her.”

Lance winks, like he’s trying to say _don’t worry about it_ when Keith is only worrying the more, because Lance is breaking from a script that Keith hadn’t even gotten the memo on.

“If you really want to know who we work for, you might as well ask me.” Lance smirks, crossing his arms. “I’m kind of the leader here.”

The telepaths look at each other, then at Lance, in all his scrawny plucky glory. Silence pulls taut like cellophane, suffocating them, and in those few eon-filled seconds, Keith is sure they’re all fucked to hell and all because Lance had to open his big stupid mouth. Wouldn’t be surprised if they killed them all on the spot.

“Take me. I’ll tell you everything about who we work for. I have no loyalty to them.”

Pidge’s eyes widen, and then they drop her tiny body into a heap on the ground next to where Hunk is curled and shaking and reaching for Lance. Lance doesn’t resist, even pulling his sleeve out of Keith’s grip; Lance doesn’t even cop an attitude, when they roughly grab his arms and lead him to the door. He smirks again like he knows exactly what the fuck he’s doing.

He can’t physically protect Pidge, none of them can, so he’s simply taking her place instead. The only way he knows how: by being as annoying as possible.

“Lance—” The air suddenly feels punched from Keith’s lungs, rather than arrested in place, as it had been when they’d picked up Pidge. He lunges, only to back up when he hears the tasers spring to life, glowing and sparking in the dark of the room.

“Don’t worry, Keith. Me and the boys are just going out for drinks,” Lance says with a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Aren’t we, boys?”

The telepaths don’t answer. Lance shrugs like he’s disappointed one of them didn’t burst into song.

Keith is having a hard time thinking straight past wanting to screaming what the _fuck_ _do you think you’re doing_ because if Lance somehow gets them into deeper shit. If Lance runs his mouth and somehow gets them killed…

“Keith.” And suddenly Lance isn’t smiling at all, steel intent pulling his spine upwards. They’re marching him towards the door and their eyes are locked, and Lance tips his head, voice firm. “I got this.”

The doors slam closed.

“Oh my god.” Hunk rises, looks like he’s going to throw up, or have a panic attack, or both. Pidge is just standing there, fists clenched at her sides, shaky and ashen. “Oh my god oh my god what the hell did he just do.”

“He knows what he’s doing.” Keith’s voice sounds hollow and detached, and it’s with a Herculean effort he forces his eyes away from the door. “We’ve got to figure a way out of here, before it’s too late.”

That’s, of course, when the screaming starts.

Keith has unfortunately, heard plenty of screaming from Lance. He knows by now Lance grew up in a household where you had to yell to be heard, so much of the things that come out of his mouth involve shouting. Lance laughs loud, snores loud. He takes up space with the size of sound and heart like none Keith had never seen before.

But these are not screams of laughter, or exhilaration.

These are screams of terror; the sound of that scraping kind of fear leaves you hoarse, throat raw, and lungs heaving.

Lance screams, and for a solid few moments, the world around Keith goes white, blind with panic. For a few solid moments, Keith is back at base camp, and Shiro is missing, and Keith is alone, and alone, and alone and—

“We have to get him out of there.” The words in his own voice echo on Keith’s ears and drag him gasping back to reality, forcing breath into his lungs, keeping him upright and standing. “Pidge, can we get some kind if signal sent out? There’s got to be something—”

“They took everything we had on us. I don’t have two wires to twist together. But if Shiro—”

“Shiro’s not coming,” Keith says flatly. “And even if he is, we’re not going to wait around for that to happen.”

They don’t have much to work with. The cave system of tunnels seems a hybrid of machine and rock that’s fused together. They sit and thinking in tense silence. For how long, Keith can’t say. Seconds and hours don’t have much precedence when in the dark, when the only time that matters is ‘too late.’

Keith knows it’s a lot of time that passes though. Knows by the screams. Knows by the amount of times he pulls himself back from the edge of a panic attack. Knows by the amount of times he bites his cheek so hard he tastes blood.

In the end, it’s Pidge who comes up with the idea. In two seconds she’s got a bobby pin pulled from the sole of her shoe, and has taken Hunk’s and Keith’s shoelaces. He’s not exactly sure what she’s doing to the mechanism within the door’s control panel that Hunk pried off the wall with his bare hands, but he doesn’t really need to know. Lance’s screams fill his head like the telepath’s voice, impossible to ignore or think around. They drop off into silences that are somehow more terrible, silences where Keith presses himself against the door and thinks _please god no please I’ll do anything please_.

But then the screaming picks up again. And it’s somehow, a terrible sickening relief when it does. Because it means Lance is still alive. Because it means they haven’t killed him yet.

When Pidge, brilliant Pidge, springs the door open, Keith doesn’t think. He kicks out at the nearest guard in the stomach and locks his arms around that throat until its eyes close and it slumps against the wall. He grab the blade it was holding, body is in autopilot mode, and he only knows Pidge and Hunk are with him by their quick exchange of plans, but it’s like they’re speaking a language Keith can’t understand. The noise from the end of the hallway has dropped off again.

Before he even turns around, Pidge is again fiddling with wires that she’s pulled out of the cave wall, setting off alarms all over the building. They duck around the corner as telepaths run down the hallway towards the sound, clearing the room at the end of the hallway, where he knows Lance is.

His heart stands still, arrested in fear of what’s on the other side of the door, even as Pidge overrides the control panel and Hunk shoves it open.

The room is empty. Their weapons sit on a table in the corner. There’s a still body on the table, and Keith is once again struck by the disconcerting reality of quiet Lance. Only now, it’s terrifying.

Lance isn’t screaming anymore. Lance isn’t bleeding. Lance doesn’t even look like they’d laid so much as a finger on him, not on the surface at least. Yet, with the way he’s acting, entire body is pulled tight like a wire, muscles straining against the straps over his chest, it’s like they’ve been slicing into him for hours, invisible knives and cuts all over him. Sweat coats the surface of his skin like it’s been pouring off him for hours, like he’s been running a marathon.

It takes everything in Keith’s limited control not to throw up. If there were any telepaths in the room, he’d gut them, make them hurt and bleed. The rage washes over him, skewing his vision, filling his lungs with hot ash that punches out in angry breaths.

“Keith…” Pidge puts her hand on his shoulder. “These guys are telepaths. So whatever they did to him, we can’t see the damage from here.”

It is, somehow, worse than anything Keith could have imagined. He can stitch a cut, ice a bruise, reset a dislocated shoulder and splint a broken wrist. But Keith cannot fix this.

“C’mon,” Keith says tightly, steeling himself into action, “We’ve got to go. Hunk, would you—”

“Roger that.” Hunk nods, mouth set in a grim line, before he smiles, tone going light and casual, “Alright, Lance, my dude, we’re gonna do this bridal style just like Karaoke night at the Garrison, you with me?”

Hunk walks forward without hesitation, but the second he touches Lance, Lance _screams_ , the sound ripping out of his chest unannounced and ragged, terrified. His eyes are open now, but they are unseeing, a million miles away, and whatever they are seeing can’t be anything good. The scream tapers off into terrified whimpers as he flinches away from Hunk, who immediately recoils, face ashen.

“I don’t…” Hunk whispers, he looks at his hands, at Keith, eyes wide, “I don’t understand.”

It hits Keith, the horrifying reality of what exactly they had to have done with Lance’s mind for him to flinch away from his best friend. He steps forward, trying not to shake with rage. It helps no one, least of all Lance, who needs help the most.

“Hey, Blue.” Keith doesn’t know what the _fuck_ he’s doing but they’re out of time and they can’t stay here for too long. “You gotta get up. Wake up. Open your eyes.”

Lance whimpers, teeth rattling together like he’s about to fly apart. Keith’s never seen such an open expression of fear and hopelessness. He never wants to see such a look ever again.

Keith leans close, breathes deep and exhales gentle, calms himself. “Lance.”

Lance’s eyes shoot open, still that same summer night blue. They stare, blinking and glassy, at the ceiling for a few moments, and then slowly slide over until they hit Keith, widening in recognition.

And damn him, the motherfucker has the audacity to _smile_ , the corner of his pained mouth twisting upwards. “Keith. Hey buddy.”

The relief is dizzying as it hits Keith, but even as he reaches for him, Lance still flinches away.

“I’m sorry,” Keith says, even though he’s not quite sure what he’s even sorry for, just the preternatural sense that this is somehow his fault. “I’m sorry, but we’ve got to move you. We need to get out of here. I’m going to need you to get up.”

Pupils dilating in and out of focus, Lance swallows, throat clicking, and gives a tiny nod of consent. Even so, the noise Lance makes when Keith touches him is soft and stifled and wounded. It’s the kind of sound that is going to haunt him for the rest of his life.

Carefully, he slices through the straps and deftly maneuvers Lance until he’s plastered against Keith’s back, clinging like a small child. If it were any other circumstance, any other day, Keith would be bitching and moaning about how heavy Lance is left and right.

As it is, he mostly just talks to be sure that Lance is alert and listening, firm assurances and the occasional jostling just so he can be sure of the heartbeat against his spine through Lance’s shirt—fast and terrified but undoubtedly alive.

It’s a short trip back to their ship, which is guarded, of course, but Keith is only peripherally aware of the fight as Hunk and Pidge engage around them. The electric slice of Pidge’s bayard in the dark, the bright yellow boom of Hunk’s cannon, it feels like background lighting to the pulse in Lance’s neck, to the sound of his breathing. To every bit of Keith’s attention focused on getting him somewhere safe.

Time passes in odd increments, sentence fragments punctuated by the sound of Lance’s ragged breathing, his occasional whimpers against the nape of Keith’s neck. Keith barely registers anything until they’re already flying away in the jet, Hunk and Pidge exchanging terse directions, techno babble that Keith has neither time nor patience to dissect.

It’s cramped, no blankets or anything that might help put Lance at ease so he might get legitimate rest while they get back to the others. He’s asleep, again, but the way his brow furrows tells Keith that it’s not going to be an easy ride back to the castle, for any of them.

“Do you guys need any help up there?” Keith doesn’t look up from the movement of Lance’s closed eyes as he twitches and dreams. His eyelashes are wet, a wet that tracks down his cheeks.

“We’ve got it,” Pidge says in a low voice. “You stay with him.”

Like the statement alone is a subconscious permission, Lance curls against Keith like he’s starving for contact of any sort, the cold of his clammy skin seeking out Keith’s warmth. Trembling fingers wrap around the collar of Keith’s jacket and hold tight, as Lance presses his clammy forehead to the vulnerable skin of Keith’s neck and shudders through his fever dreams, muted sounds of pain telegraphing from his mouth into Keith’s sternum.

It’s a long and painfully slow ride back to the castle. Keith spends all of it making sure Lance keeps breathing. An unnecessary precaution, likely, but it’s the only thing he can do that feels useful, productive. That initial acidic rush of adrenaline and fear settles into a bitter and lucid exhaustion, but he does not sleep.

He does not sleep, and Lance presses himself to Keith like he wants to crawl out of his own skin and into Keith’s, like he’ll do anything to escape the pain.

He does not sleep, and he does not let go. Somewhere between one galaxy and the next in this long dark night, somewhere between one fever dream and the next, between counting the faint freckles across Lance’s cheeks and counting the number of times he’s ever let a human touch him like this without them coming away bloody, Keith realizes that he does not even want to.

He does not sleep, but he whispers about garlic knots and rainstorms, Lance’s sweaty hair tickling his cheek.

He does not sleep, but the nightmares spin themselves out to completion anyway, the worst-case scenarios that they’d barely avoided. Those stains of ‘what if’ that will never quite fade.

Here is the thing that Keith has begun to piece together with each and every mission. Each member of Voltron is important and vital for their own reasons. They all had their different strengths and assets, a piece to the Defenders of the Universe puzzle.

There was no question about his place here. Keith is the arm. Quick, reactionary, all instinct no afterthought. Grab, take, pull, and tear what he had to survive. Keith had been the first to discover his Bayard weapon, the first to outright challenge Zarkon. He existed to throw punches and pick pockets when the others couldn’t, or wouldn’t.

Temperamental, Allura had called him, when she’d explained the purposes of the Paladins in relation to their lions. It seemed to fit the bill, even if it stung a bit. He wasn’t going to deny it.

When Allura had explained the purposes of the Paladins in relation to their lions, she had called Keith the temperamental one. Shiro, the decisive leader. Pidge, intellectual and daring. Hunk, caring and kind.

And Lance, Lance had cut her off with some stupid quip before she’d gotten the chance to define him. Keith picks at the unfinished conversation now like an old scab, as if reminiscing will somehow create the word that had been about to leave Allura’s mouth, help him piece together the muddled paradox that made up Lance.

The blue lion was the right leg of Voltron. So by simple logic its Paladin had to be sturdy, unwavering, support. Hunk was that. Hunk often fought just by knocking into things, the bulk of both he and his lion a physical shield. But Lance was more fluid than that. A support that altered, depending on where it was needed, and why.

If the blue lion is the leg, then its Paladin was the heart, the person connecting their unit. Diverting blood, diverting life, away from itself to wherever it was needed in the body. Anatomically, the leg has the femoral arteries, vital and necessary.

His head throbs. Against his neck, the sweaty warmth of Lance is reassuring and terrifying at once.

Because if you puncture that artery, just make one little knick in it, the whole organism bleeds to death.

\--

They dock at the shuttle bay inside the castle, door bursting open as Allura, Coran, and Shiro come bolting in, freezing in their tracks. They don’t look banged up, they don’t look like anything had been detaining them. In fact, they don’t even look remotely worried or upset, really annoyed.

“Where have you been?” Allura frowns. “I told you not to leave the ship until we came back! We couldn’t find any F’destrians. Their fortress was abandoned but we’re thinking that if we—” She stops, cutting off, eyes wide, as she sees the four of them.

Keith’s suddenly so angry that if it weren’t for Lance pressed against him, he’d be up and on the offensive in a heartbeat. As it is, he’s angry enough to haul Lance to his feet and start helping him off the plane, and not complain about the weight like he would any other day.

Allura gasps, pressing a hand over her mouth, eyes shining, “Is he—”

“He’s been tortured,” Pidge cuts in, and Keith is so fucking grateful for her being there with them. Because at this moment in time he doesn’t even trust himself to speak without screaming. “You should have mentioned that the F’destrians would be hostile. We don’t think they actually did anything to his body, but he’s been asleep most of the flight back anyhow.”

“Tortured?” Allura chokes.

“Alright,” Coran says in a chipper voice, already sensing the tension. “Let’s get this one to the infirmary, see if we should put him in a healing pod!”

Pidge and Hunk help Lance up, carry him off with Coran.

“What happened?” Shiro asks. “We came back to the ship and you guys were gone.”

It’s the first time that Keith has ever ignored Shiro. He doesn’t trust himself to answer. Not without punching Shiro in the face.

Instead, he looks at Allura. He can see the guilt plainly on her face, but she does not flinch, or let Shiro serve as a shield from the venomous glare that Keith gives her.

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

Her mouth falls open as if to explain, but then she shakes her head, mouth set in a grim line.

Keith’s jaw clenches. “Right. Glad to know Lance being tortured tonight was for nothing.”

Shiro frowns. “Keith, that’s hardly fair.”

A smaller and softer part of Keith knows that they care, knows that they are sorry, knows that in some fucked up way that he’s taking out on them what he can’t on Lance, who’s both unconscious and hurt. But he doesn’t have time to listen to the softer parts of himself, that much is clear. Soft people do stupid things, like willingly volunteer themselves for mental torture for hours on end.

Keith doesn’t have the luxury of being soft. He’s too busy trying to look after everybody else. He is made of angles and edges that cut, and when he turns on his heel, he lets them show.

“You know what? You’re right, Shiro. It isn’t fair. Thank you, for pointing out the glaringly obvious. It isn’t fair that Lance was tortured, it wasn’t fair that Allura napped for ten thousand years and all she got stuck with in the aftermath are a bunch of _kids_ and a washed up captain who can’t get through one fight without some kind of fucked up PTSD flashback. None of this is _fair_ , Shiro.” He turns to Allura. “We’re fighting a losing battle out there against a fucking empire, and one day, it’s going to get one of us killed, can’t you see that? Lance could have died. So tell me, _Princess_ , in all of your moseying about to unchartered planets hoping to make friendship bracelets with the inhabitants, did it ever occur to you we’re trying our fucking _best_ and that none of this is ever gonna be fair?”

The words spill out of his mouth, hot and caustic, and he waits for the biting command to hold his tongue, the admonishment, but it doesn’t come. Shiro’s face remains stoic as ever, but his eyes are downcast, spine not as straight. Allura won’t look at him either, but her face has crumpled inwards, the regal lift of her chin now trembling.

“I’m going to go check on Lance,” Keith says, eyes fixed on Shiro’s shoulder, wishing he had the energy to apologize, but it’s difficult to work up any emotion big enough to spill over what feels like a hole in his chest, vacuous and draining. Keith is seventeen years old, and he is so, so tired.

He half expects Shiro to come after him, place that paternal hand on Keith’s shoulder, display that earnestness that Keith was always jealous of, even back at the Garrison. He hates and loves that people as good as Shiro exist.

But Shiro does not follow. And Keith paces the ship alone.

\--

The next few days are shaky for everyone. It only figures that Lance is the one acting like absolutely everything’s fine, but even he’s not that good of a liar.

He’s actually a terrible liar. That only makes Keith’s guilt fester more. He still tails Lance, but now every second of it feels like intruding on something he shouldn’t. Casual observations of every day behavior now feels like witnessing a murder, the way that Lance quietly falls apart whenever he’s left alone for a long enough period of time.

He’s been trying for hours now to fix another small mechanical error in Blue, a dent in the tail, something like that. The floor is littered with tools that got picked up and discarded just as quick. The normal Lance-to-lion chatter and off-tune humming muted into silence.

Keith hates this. Mostly because there’s nothing he can do to prevent it.

Lance’s hands shake as they pick up the wrench. He seems a thousand miles away.

“Hey.” Keith can’t stand the silence or the trembling hands for one more second, walks forward and picks the wrench up, turning it over in his hands. “Getting clumsy there, are we?”

Lance twitches like he’s on something, cold sweat on his brow and jittery. Like he wants to run. It’s a look Keith recognizes all too well.

“Did you know I have a dead sister?” Lance blurts.

The words die in Keith’s throat, sink back down to his stomach and meet the rising tide of guilt within him. He rallies as best as he can, toeing a line that seems comprised of eggshells and glass shards. Apologies won’t do anyone any good here.

“No. No, I didn’t know that, Lance.”

Lance shoulders his way past Keith, grabs the wrench from him and tosses it in the toolbox, talking just audibly enough that only Keith can hear him. “I never told anyone. Not even Hunk. But I’m pretty sure Hunk knew. She was sarcastic. Hilarious. Took classes at the local beauty college, wrote stand-up material and performed at some local comedy clubs. Loved teasing me, especially while she did my hair in little barrettes and braids when I was a kid. You’d have liked her.”

Keith thinks of the projected mental picture of all those people that look like Lance, as if he can remember the brief glimpse of Lance’s sister’s face among the group. It doesn’t matter what she looks like, though.

For the sake of not startling Lance back into silence, he stands very, very still.

“It was a while ago. Before I left for the Garrison. Drunk driver, middle of the night as she was driving home from work. She worked so hard. Didn’t drink. Didn’t get in trouble. And at the end of the day, all the good in her didn’t add up to shit.”

The frantic energy that seems to be rattling the chains of Lance’s bones seems to have run its course, his movements slowing, more minute the longer he talks, until he’s leaning against Blue like she’s the only thing holding him up, and not moving at all.

“I kind of took her place. I was the big brother now. Gwen was gone, so I did what I could. Helped Ma out. I was never that good at it though. It turns out that to take care of people, you have to be really, really strong. That was Gwen. Gwen was really really strong. But that was never… never my forte.”

Keith, as useless as he feels, suddenly aches to touch Lance the way he had when they’d escaped the telepaths. He does not move. The raw exposure of Lance’s pain makes him want to steal it from him and gobble it whole himself, make it _his_ , so it wouldn’t have to be Lance’s.

A smile like a broken limb, bent at all the wrong angles, makes its way onto Lance’s face. “I found out later, after digging up news reports and such, that she flew about fifteen feet before she hit the ground. And then she died. It wasn’t instantaneous. It wasn’t quick. She flew fifteen feet through a windshield. And when I think about it, like, I close my eyes and I see that accident in my head, that’s what I’m really afraid of. I’m not afraid of dying. I’m just afraid of dying for no reason. Dying for nothing. Dying without a purpose.”

“We don’t get to choose that.” Keith says. “That’s not really in our control.”

With a shrug, Lance snatches another tool out of the toolbox and clambers onto Blue’s haunches, crawling towards her left shoulder. He twists the screwdriver into a groove, sweating. Keith thinks of all the times he’s seen Lance do this before. Thinks of the whistling, and the humming, and the low voice in which he’d talked to Blue as he worked. This is a different kind of quiet than the one he’d seen before. It’s silence. Lance doesn’t make a single sound, and Keith is left grappling with the uncontrollable urge to murder something.

“You know, I can fly a robot lion and fire laser canons out of the sky all with the flick of my wrist. But I don’t get to choose this. I only get to hope that when I die, it’s for something good.“

Back when all this started, Allura had told them that there would be risks. That it would be dangerous. That they were going to save the universe.

Keith had never thought of Lance dying. Lance pulled plenty of dumbass stunts before, but he was _Lance_ , the guy who made things up as he went, who always had some kind of kamikaze scheme up his sleeve that saved his ass in the end. In their team, he was the right leg of Voltron, meant to be as sturdy and constant as Hunk, just as strong.

You see a boy with charm in spades and a crooked smile and a quip for everything, and he does not look like a boy that could hurt and bleed. He doesn’t seem like a boy that could die.

But then, dying was for heroes, after all. No wonder Lance was trying so hard to do it.

The tool slips from Lance’s fingers and clatters loudly to the floor.

Keith had taken all of Lance’s ramblings about parades and assumed that he had only wanted the glory. Which, Keith realizes, had probably been exactly what Lance had wanted him to think.

He lifts the screwdriver from the floor, goes to press it into Lance’s hands.

When their eyes catch, he sees the little brother as much as he sees the soldier, and he wonders if everything Lance had ever done was a front for the heart inside of him that seemed to only want to protect everyone around it.

Maybe Lance was not such a terrible liar after all.

\--

This adrenaline high lasts longer than the others. Keith comes out of it jittery and feral, ready to fight with anyone who so much as offers one, but the offer doesn’t come.

He picks one instead, stomps over to Allura’s quarters after two days without a wink of sleep. She’s been avoiding him since his outburst in the shuttle bay. He knows that she’s completely within her right to be upset with him, but he’s never really hurt someone’s feelings before and had to deal with the aftermath. It was always cut ties and move on.

Out of everyone on the team—even Lance, baffling asshole that he is—Keith has spent even less time getting to know Allura. She often feels unapproachable in a way that most of his other teammates do not. He respects her leadership but what he knows of her makes him wary. Her love for her culture, her planet, her family. He doesn’t get it, and isn’t sure he wants to.

Allura comes straight to the door just a few seconds after he’s knocked, and he’s surprised not to find her in her usual gown or armor, as if he expected her to be wearing it in sleep. Instead, she’s wearing loose fitting pants and a shirt, white hair gathered in a sloppy knot on top of her head. The mice are gathered in her arms and perching on her shoulder, blinking sleepily. It’s the most undone he’s ever seen her look, and it makes him falter a bit. The scolding he’d been bracing himself for doesn’t come, and rather she looks a bit embarrassed to be seeing him, like she was the one who’d come barging in on him instead of the opposite.

“Keith—” She reaches for her robe. “It’s late. Is everything alright? Is Lance—”

“He’s fine,” Keith says, suddenly feeling awkward. He’d been prepared for an angry confrontation, to lay his demands out and meet resistance. But now he’s faced with the opposite, and it flusters him. “Or. He’s not fine. But that’s why I’m here. I guess. Uh.” He takes a deep breath, expels it. “I think we should take a break. A team vacation, or something. Reboot.”

Allura blinks, frowning in confusion. She towers over Keith, and he feels like an asshole without her saying a word.

“I get that we’ve got shit to do, and you want to get it done. But we’re tired. And I’m doubly tired, because I’ve been on stupid patrol making sure Lance’s dumb ass doesn’t get into any more trouble. We need a break. Or we’re going to break next time you take us out for a test drive.”

He’s expecting her to protest, but is again surprised when she flinches, glancing down. One of the mice squeaks softly at her, and she frowns, troubled, before lifting her eyes and nodding slowly at Keith, serious, diplomatic, regal.

“Alright. We can discuss options with the team in the morning, and put it to a vote.”

“Thank you,” Keith says stiltedly. He’d been expecting a bigger fight from her. Allura isn’t one to be bossed around or dictated to, especially not after what he’d said.

There’s an awkward moment as they stand there, and it’s only broken by another pip from the mice, which makes Allura shush them, before giving Keith a long and searching look.

“I’m glad you’re looking after Lance,” she says softly, and there’s something about the tone that feels a bit too knowing for Keith’s liking. “I’d begun to worry the Red and Blue paladins would never get along.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” Keith blurts, feeling oddly exposed, “He just needs time to get back on his feet.”

“I think,” Allura says quietly, “that we all do.”

Keith nods, eyes downcast. There’s something so much sadder about the large royal chamber that the Princess sleeps in in comparison with the tiny barracks. He wonders if she sleeps easily, and then realizes, thinking on how quickly she’d come to the door, how awake she seemed, that she likely does not.

The following morning, the vote is unanimous. Even Lance can’t deny the appeal of a break, smiling a bit when Allura announces they’ve got a week at most before it’s back to training. A week isn’t long, but it’ll be enough. Better than putting them right in the thick of it.

Better than Keith having to worry himself sick over Lance.

\--

So, the gang takes a mini-vacation. Arus is comfortable and familiar and they’re of course welcomed with open arms, full meals, and drink.

At first, it’s like they’re almost hesitant to relax, like the new definition of vacation had simply become ‘wait for the other shoe to drop.’

Weirdly enough, it’s Lance who’s the last to really come out of his shell. Keith had expected him to embrace it with relief and wholehearted enthusiasm, but Lance barely cracks a smile that looks genuine the entire welcome celebration, excuses himself halfway through the meal.

They’re technically supposed to spend vacation time away from their Lions, but on more nights then not, Keith can hear the telltale sounds of flight above the castle, spot Blue from the observation windows. Imagines Blue’s Paladin sitting at the controls, frowning like he’s trying to outrun something.

What was supposed to be a vacation at first feels like quite the opposite. Keith had demanded it so he could _stop_ worrying about Lance’s stupid ass, but now that they’re grounded and relaxed, Lance’s every move is his top priority and concern. He watches his food intake, watches the shadows under his eyes, and feels unease wring his stomach dry, keeps him up more often then not at night.

On their second week of vacation, Keith switches tactics, considering that maybe _rest_ isn’t the right word needed for Lance, the right technique.

Per a casual suggestion to Shiro, and multiple ecstatically enthusiastic Arusians, the team goes on a hike. It’s met with much resistance at first, even Keith can’t help but bitch about getting up with the sun, but by mid-day they’re miles into the deep forests of Arus. They traipse through roving hills of grass that Hunk insists they all roll down to the bottom of, meadows and thickets alike, until they come to Arus’ sacred waterfalls.

It’s breathtaking, the water so clear it looks fake, dyed, chemical, cascading into emerald pools that the team all strip down to their undergarments and dive into, splashing about until the sun goes down and their toes are so pruned they’re sore. Somewhere between Hunk cannonballing off the top of the falls before anyone else and heading home, the spiraled tight tension between Lance’s shoulders eases, and he smiles, loosens, breathes. By the time Allura insists they head back to the castle, Lance is perched on Hunk’s shoulders, bellowing like a gorilla and challenging Pidge to a third game of Chicken as she perch atop Shiro’s. They’re all wrinkled from hours in the water and warmly baked from hours beneath the sun. Pidge and Keith a bit pink on their shoulders, much to the mirth of everyone else.

“This was a good idea,” Shiro says to Keith as he steps out of the water, the white of his bangs flopping wetly against his forehead, his arm catching in the sunlight. It’s the youngest he’s looked since he came back to Earth, before all of this. “We needed this. You were always good with what to do in a crisis.”

“No,” Keith responds quietly, “that was always you. You always know what to do when things are bad. I panic. I run. Or, I yell at people who don’t deserve it.”

Shiro frowns, like he’s not quite sure how to respond.

The person he’d yelled at the other day wasn’t the pseudo-brother who’d had his back in flight school. This person has scars and a metal arm and more weight on his shoulders than Keith knew what to do with.

“I shouldn’t have said the things I did,” Keith says, picking a hangnail, knowing Shiro is looking on him with that quiet understanding he always had and not being able to take it right now. “I was angry, and scared, and I reacted badly. And I’m sorry.”

“When you feel like that…” Shiro looks down at his metal hand, rotating his wrist, the metal shifting and glinting in the sun. “It’s not always good to keep those sort of fears inside. They don’t tend to exorcise themselves in healthy ways.”

“I know,” Keith says. “Just. That’s never come easy. You know that.”

And Shiro did. He’d always felt like the grounding sort of moral compass that Keith never had, always first to hold Keith back from stepping up to a fight, from getting into trouble. Like most people who are kind to Keith, he questioned it, but Shiro never really did anything to disappoint.

Until the Kerberos mission. Until he walked away. But Keith was used to people doing that by then.

“You’re a good teammate, Keith. And you have a place here. Just like the rest of us. And if that means you yell at me from time to time when one of us gets hurt, well, so be it.”

Shiro’s got a wry smile, and suddenly they’re back at the Garrison, and Keith is a pilot years ahead of his peers, glowing under the warmth of a first feeble attempt at friendship. And then Pidge is clambering on Keith’s shoulders to press her frigid toes on his hot skin and Hunk is asking if anyone’s got leftover snacks and Allura is once again trying to remind them that the Arusian sun is indeed going down.

They dry out on the rocks in the rapidly cooling night air and run stupid relay races and make up team chants all the way back to where the castle is stationed. Pidge turns out to give all of them a run for their money, she’s so fast. They keep falling mid race, scraping their knees and screaming as they go. Lance is smiling and laughing.

Keith feels lighter than he has in days.

\--

Hours after Keith has assumed everyone else to be asleep after their long hike, there’s a knock on his door.

He doesn’t know whom he was expecting, but at the same time there was no one else he would expect to show up more.

Lance holds up two sizably large bottles of what appears to be that god awful Arusian purple drink, looking like the cat that caught the canary.

“Is that what I think it is?”

“Arusian mead. Courtesy of our fanbase. They practically threw it at me when I asked for just a pint.”

“You didn’t.” Keith’s lips twitch upwards despite himself, fighting like hell to keep a smile from breaking out in full force. It’s hard to quell the urge when there’s Lance, eyes glinting, mischievous and sly as a fox, looking exactly like Lance again. And that makes all the difference in the world.

“I’m pretty sure Shiro will actually kill us if he wakes up,” Lance says, uncorking the large bottle, and sniffing it pretentiously like some kind of wine connoisseur would. “And I know Allura will skin us alive. But I’ve always wanted to party it up in space.”

They stand in the doorway, grinning stupidly at each other. Keith wonders offhandedly if this the discovery of what it means to be seventeen: to be stupid and reckless and not really accounting for anyone else.

“I’ll get Pidge and Hunk up.”

Lance’s grin only widens. “You were the last stop, Mullet. They’re already waiting in the ballroom for us to join them.”

\--

They’re not actively trying to get shitfaced, if anyone asks. They’re just four friends, passing around a bottle, shooting the shit. If they happen to get shitfaced, well, that’s only an added bonus.

It starts with Lance matching Hunk shot for shot and then, when Keith is reluctant to participate, demanding that he do the same.

It starts with:

“What, you chicken?” Lance’s eyes glitter.

Keith’s answering shot of Arusian mead is answer enough to that.

It starts with sitting around and Pidge playing random music off her laptop, old music and older music. They tease her at first for being too small to handle the alcohol, in response to which Pidge, with a flipped bird and a muttered ‘fuck you’ takes a dainty swig that makes her face go red. They fall over themselves laughing. Everything in the world seems funny, and warm, and safe.

Time lurches forward, as the first empty bottle of mead rolls across the floor.

It starts with the same goddamn song playing over and over again, one that Keith has never heard before but is now starting to recognize simply because it’s been on loop since this whole thing started.

Wheezing with laughter, Keith snatches Pidge’s laptop from her hands, “Pidge. What the hell kind of song is this? This is just,” he squints at the laptop screen, “ _Africa by Toto_ on repeat for like eighty hours.”

Hunk whips around after taking another shot with Lance, eyes wide, as the beginning jungle drums that they’ve already heard at least twelve times kick in, like he’s hearing the music for the first time.

“OH MY GOD,” he shouts, “I FUCKING _LOVE_ THIS SONG.”

“LITERALLY,” Lance yells back, grabs Hunk by the shoulders in a dramatic tango stance and drunkenly twirls him around the room. At one point Hunk _flips_ Lance over his shoulder like a ragdoll in some weird choreographed dance flip and Pidge laughs so hard she cries, and it’s somehow even funnier when Lance lands on his feet, light and agile as a cat.

Is this always how it happens? Keith looks around him, at the flushed faces, at the drunken stupid warriors of Voltron. Is this how you unmake yourself, wind down? You surround yourself with people that make the world seem a little less awful in its cruelty, you do reckless things. You allow yourself the luxury of coming to a full stop, knowing nothing bad will happen if you take just a second to breathe and exist and not apologize for it.

“C’mon.” Lance smiles, but it’s a genuine one, not the kind Keith usually wants to smack off his face. As silly as he’s acting, every bit of it is real, the ease and happiness that comes with just the right amount of alcohol.

 _C’mon_ , Lance says, and before Keith can think of an excuse not to, he’s letting Lance swing him around, just like he did with Hunk. Only this time, it doesn’t end with a dramatic dip or flip. Only this time, Lance pulls him close, settles his hands on the small of Keith's back. His palms are warm. _Keith_ is warm.

It shouldn’t surprise him to know that Lance actually knows a thing or two about dancing. But then again, they’ve had the same song on repeat for the better part of an hour, and it doesn’t take much to sway your hips and shift your weight on beat. Still, he moves his body like he’s done this before. Keith knows this, because he’s paying attention to every subtle shift of Lance against him.

Lance is taller than him. By barely a few inches, but it feels like a bigger distance now. He hates it most of the time.

He’s having a hard time remembering why he hates it now.

“Look at that, you’re a natural!”

“Look at that, you’re drunk.”

Lance giggles, _giggles_ , the laughter genuine, the joy contagious. His cheeks are pink and his hair is sticking to his forehead with sweat. His mouth is slack with drink and Keith thinks _there you are_. It’s a stupid and possessive thought, surely fueled by alcohol, but in this moment he can’t help the feeling that the Lance he’s gotten hints and glimmers of over the past few months, the Lance who has been playing hide and seek since the telepaths got into his head, has now reared his head in earnest.

It’s disgusting, really, how charmed Keith is.

“I might be.” Lance shrugs. “Dance with me anyhow.”

Keith does. It’s holy fucking awkward at first, simply because Keith is existing in a weird space where touching Lance doesn’t feel necessarily okay to do yet it’s all he _wants_ to do. He’s got an excuse with the alcohol, a guise that can explain away anything, so Keith… relaxes. Lets his arms hang around Lance’s neck, lets their chests brush, lets Lance sway their bodies like palms in the wind, tossing without direction. Although, it’s less dancing and more tipping over and righting themselves only when they’re about to lose their balance and fall.

The third time they nearly keel over together, Lance is cackling, the whip crack sound high in his throat, head thrown back, and Keith feels all the vital organs in him seize at the sight. He tries to tamp it down and chalk it up to BAC levels but the feeling, a steady persistent throb in his gut, won’t allow itself to be chased away or repressed.

With little to no escape available, Keith does the only thing he _can_ do that isn’t outright running from the room with his tail tucked between his legs. He throws his head back and screams out loud the scant few lyrics that he’s managed to pick up on the last fifteen listens or so, which of course sets the entire group off in a chorus of cheers, egging him on, further. Keith lets the alcohol in his bloodstream drag him into song and dance, rather than further into Lance’s personal space.

He sings until his throat hurts, sings about blessing the goddamn rains in goddamn Africa like he knows what the fuck that means. It’s almost cathartic, trading in one suffering for another. He can grapple with real, physical pain. No one ever taught him what to do with a tug in his chest that seemed to pull him out of himself it was so deep.

Time lurches forward again as the second bottle is passed around and almost finished off, and they all end up on the floor at one point, spinning the bottle and playing drunken versions of Never Have I Ever, and Truth or Dare. Lance’s knee is pressed against Keith’s and Lance sways back and forth into Keith’s personal bubble and Keith couldn’t ignore this even if he wanted to. But he is well and pleasantly buzzed, and so that tugging doesn’t feel as dangerous in this way.

He’s drunk, and that’s how he lets their knees press. That’s how, when Lance throws out an arm around his shoulder, he lets himself lean into the heat of another body, and basks in it.

That’s how he really doesn’t even take note of when Pidge and Hunk stumble off to bed. Only notices they’re gone because Lance is standing and saying, “Maybe we should take a cue from our fellow Paladins and get some shut eye, yeah?”

“Yeah.” Keith nods numbly, already missing the warmth of Lance’s arm over his shoulder.

He thinks, offhandedly, of Ginger the mean old tabby cat. She may have been a wild and cantankerous thing. But maybe, just maybe, she had also been starving for the one thing she seemed to reject repeatedly.

They trip themselves down the long hallway, which is agonizing to do when drunk. Up is down and left is right and Lance is so _funny_ , he keeps bumping into Keith and making Keith laugh so hard he feels like his sides are splitting.

“I say VOL! YOU SAY TRON! VOL—“

“VOLTRON!” Keith shouts, and the wheezing shaking laugh Lance keeps making is the best sound he’s ever heard.

It’s clear that the lofty goal of shitfaced has been reached.

Lance is somehow still upright, but Keith’s not faring much better. It’s a mystery to Keith how it happens, but somehow they’re in Lance’s room first and Lance is flinging himself onto his mattress with an unceremonious crash, which he of course finds hilarious.

The material of Lance’s baseball tee has ridden up to the narrow strip of hair on his stomach, and if Keith had an inkling of self-control he would be looking away now, but he’s got nothing. Air feels tight to breathe, space crowding in. Lance is sprawling and stretching out to the corners of his mattress without a sound and Keith is just standing looking down at him. Can’t seem to think of a goddamn thing to say.

He’s so warm.

“Wait.” Lance snatches at the sleeve of Keith’s jacket, and he spends a solid second trying to suss out when exactly he’d decided that it was time to go. “Stay.”

“This is a bad idea.”

“Stay anyway,” Lance counters. “I haven’t slept through the night in a while. Not since.”

Not since. Lance doesn’t have to clarify. He sits on the floor, leaning against Lance’s bed while Lance sprawls, stretches his legs out and assumes what is as close to comfort as he can get. The room is spinning a bit. The mattress shifts behind his back, and he stills when a hand rests in his hair. As if Lance had flung out his arm and just happened to settle it there. Everything suddenly feels tethered to that point.

“What’s your favorite place on earth?” Lance asks, and he’s drunk, Keith _knows_ he’s drunk, but the tone of his voice sounds honeysweet, and intimate. Just for Keith to hear. “Tell me about your favorite place.”

Keith swallows dryly, that state of lucid drunkenness when you can see everything clearly, fully alert, but you just don’t give a fuck. “The desert.”

“I was always more a fan of the beach myself?” Lance says dazedly, his hand not moving from Keith’s hair. “But, go on.”

“Well, you like rain don’t you?”

“I love rain. But you don’t get rain in the desert.”

“Monsoon season,” Keith mumbles, “A solid month of it.”

Yawning, Lance props his head up and stares, slack jawed, at Keith. “No kidding? Tell me about it.”

So Keith does. Talks about days so hot they scorch, and then lightning and thunder that cracked so loudly that Keith felt it in his bones, thought the goddamn apocalypse was happening that first thunderstorm. Water spilled out of the sky like the innards of a gutted animal, thick and warm, rains that came hard and constant, and then harder after the fact.

And then, after, that thick smell of Creosote. The way the desert sucked every drop up like a bendy straw at the bottom of a milkshake cup. It rained for days, on and off, always with hot days amidst it. But after the rains was cool, and quiet. Everything about the desert felt clean. He talked about missing that clean. How he missed that cool and quiet.

All the while, Lance’s hand, those nimble, gun calloused fingers, work through Keith’s hair at the back of his neck. The listless touch that only happens when you’re just drunk enough to not realize how startlingly weird this all is.

Keith’s helpless but to press back against the hand. It’s the alcohol, but that changes nothing about the fact that Lance is touching him and Keith feels parts of himself falling to bits and reassembling again under that touch, only different, only shifted, made knew.

He’ll regret every second of this in the morning, he’s sure. But for now he’s still enjoying the effects of the alcohol, and Lance’s hand is warm, and Keith’s eyelids are heavy, but he’s wide awake.

He talks about the desert until his mouth runs dry and Lance’s hand has dropped from his head to curl against the mattress. His knobby knees are tucked to his chest in a hairpin curve, snuffling a bit in his sleep, mouth falling open softly as he breathes.

Something in Keith’s chest draws tight, and he thinks, hazily, that there’s enough room in the bed for two.

He wonders, if he could bring himself to crawl in next to Lance, if they would fit. And because he catches himself wondering, he forces himself to leave.

No good thing ever came from too much alcohol and too little space in a bed. No good thing ever came from Keith giving in to that hollowed part of him that just wanted to be close to someone.

No good thing ever came from a wild thing going against its wild nature.

 

\--

Honestly, _fuck_ hangovers. Keith peels himself off his mattress like a scab. Every cell of him sweating alcohol and feeling like he’s going to fucking _die_. He barely makes it down to breakfast, gropes his way down the hallway with his eyes closed, as if doing so will keep the stabbing headache at bay.

Pidge ducks down and smirks as soon as he steps in a room, but she’s not fooling Keith for a second.

“Shut up,” he grouses, both feeling and looking like a rats nest, his skin tacky with the stench of alcohol. Hunk’s face down on the table, not even offering a greeting except to snore into his own arms, but Keith’s gotta say that Hunk still looks better than Keith feels.

The door opens again and Keith stills, equal parts humiliated at the recollection of last night’s events and jealous at the seemingly unaffected appearance of the only person who was definitely as drunk as Keith was, if not moreso.

This motherfucker.

“Good morning, team.” Lance yawns, rubbing at bloodshot eyes but generally looking cheery and unaffected. He takes a seat across from Keith, and it’s just like any regular morning. It’s just like any regular morning, and Keith’s sitting there like he’d gotten zapped with one of Pidge’s tasers.

Lance helps himself to toast, humming under his breath. His hair is sticking up on one side and there’s a pillow crease on his cheek. But there’s none of the general haggardness on his face like there is on the rest of the team. Maybe it’s the skincare regimen, maybe it’s the light, maybe it’s the simple fact that like all pure things—like marble statues that church parishioners touch the palms of, like cloudless skies or desert rains—he has yet to be corrupted or made worn by the world around him.

“What?” Lance asks, as suspicious as he is playful as he catches sight of Keith’s expression. “Do I have something on me?”

It hits Keith over the head like a sack of Balmera crystal, how truly fucked he is.

Keith had spent all this time trying to make sense of Lance, figure out which version of Lance was the real one. The cocky talkative jokester, or the gentle soldier, ready to throw himself in front of any bullet heading for his friends. Keith had been trying so damn hard to figure out which one was real, because his whole life it had been simpler to read people quick and sort them into whatever box they belonged in. He’d never had time to know someone well enough that they deserved a second thought.

That Keith might love both the jokester and the soldier, the boy who danced circles around him just last night and the boy who sat quiet and talked about missing rain, missing home, feels impossible. Yet there he sits, in all of his contradictions, buttering toast and smirking at something Hunk says and tilting the axis of the world. Lance the pilot. Lance the friend. Lance the mama’s boy and Lance the loudmouth and Lance the incorrigible. All these people that Keith has been trying to parse out, they’re right here in front of them, and oh how fond he is of them all.

There’s not enough room in Keith for the notion, it flutters and presses tight against the cage of his ribs, filling his heart with frantic wonderment, and with fear.

Propensity to care for things was something that he’d severed years ago, like a dead and infected limb that was only weighing him down and hurting him. Like any amputee, Keith had learned to live with it, walk on without it in his own broken and stilted way. He didn’t function the same way everyone else did, but he didn’t need to, when survival was the bare minimum requirement.

Only now, that phantom limb was starting to ache, and the world was expecting him to run a fucking marathon without it.

There isn’t room for Lance in Keith’s bare and fucked up life, his sleepless nights or his hollow heart. Because Keith doesn’t want just cocky talkative Lance or quiet Lance. He wants Lance in all his multitudes and shades, wants both his crooked smile and his unshakeable focus, his gangly jittery limbs and enigmatic stillness. He wants all of Lance, a person who feels too big and brilliant to belong to just one person.

Yet the want pulls at Keith like a rolling tide, eroding him down until he’s made of nothing but wondering how he could have been so goddamn blind.

\--

It’s not exactly easy to ignore things when everything about those things has changed. It’s like walking in to find your house broken into, only nothing’s been taken, only rearranged, different than it was before. There’s nothing to be done, because there’s no actual damage, but Keith’s aware of the change more than he’s ever been aware of anything. It’s not something he can just ignore, or even accept. Everything is different. And then, along that same vein, everything is exactly the same.

The worst part is, he’s not alone in noticing.

In an effort to get back to the normalcy and rigor of routine, the first day back from vacation is spent running drills. Hard work, but fulfilling work. Team Voltron is not exactly bounced back from where they were before that whole kidnap and torture stint, but they are closer. They work better, a protectiveness for each other’s backs that wasn’t as urgent before. Sparring becomes strengthening each other’s weaknesses rather than exploiting them for the sake of claiming playful victory.

Throughout it all, Keith is all too aware in Lance’s eyes on him.

He’s learned, by this point, that there’s going to be no more ignoring Lance. Not when he’s impossible to escape, makes parts of Keith ache that he didn’t know could anymore.

Lance looks at him like he’s waiting for something, expecting something.

Keith doesn’t know what to do with that, except for pretend like it’s not the only thing he can think about.

Keith finally raises his head from the dummy he’s supposed to be pummeling, the one Lance is braced behind to keep the dummy from toppling over, eyes once again locked on Lance.

“What?” It comes out sounding twice as defensive as Keith had been meaning for it to sound.

“I—” Lance stares, then closes his mouth and shakes his head. “Nothing, forget it.”

It goes like this, over and over and over, instances of Lance staring a bit too long, and not looking away when Keith catches him. It makes him feel helplessly exposed, belly up and defenseless, for reasons he doesn’t even understand.

As if just by looking, Lance is seeing right through him, straight to everything that Keith is trying frantically to cover up.

\--

A simulated mission, Allura explains to them on their third day of drills, is going to be the final layer of preparation needed for them to move forward to the next real one. They hadn’t been prepared for attack without Shiro around, but they needed to do better in future situations, especially without the lions. The simulation will work somewhat like a hallucinatory drug, making them see things in the environment that look, feel, _seem_ real. In the reality of it, they’re just in the training room same as usual, with Coran, Allura, and Shiro just behind the glass.

He’s warmed up and beelining for the room, running through his list of defensive moves that will cause minimal pain. He’ll need to keep an eye on Pidge. Her size makes her an easy target, seemingly easy to take out. His neck cricks as he stretches, trying to put himself in the mindset of battle, the laser focus of life or death.

Of course, this is naturally when he gets distracted. He’s so focused he doesn’t even see him until he’s passed him, until his name’s been called out.

“Keith?”

Lance lingers uncertainly just outside the door, hands listless at his sides, fidgeting nervously. He actually looks a bit ruffled, a bit under slept. Not in the gaunt and unsettling way after their run in with the telepaths, but enough that concern curls just beneath Keith’s sternum, despite his best efforts not to notice it.

He turns sharply to face him. “Yeah, what is it?”

They lock eyes. It’s a mistake the second it happens, he knows it. Lance opens his mouth. Closes it. Keith suppresses a noise of frustration, unsure of where he wants to direct it. Settles for asking, instead.

“What do you want from me, Lance?”

“I—are you okay?”

The uncharacteristic nervousness only serves to make Keith feel even cagier, without reason.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

Lance doesn’t break eye contact, and Keith wishes he’d look anywhere else but at him. “I dunno, you seem kind of… standoffish, I guess? Thought something was bothering you.”

He’s stepped closer to Keith, like being in Keith’s personal space is just a thing they _do_. Like the two of them standing near one another is natural. He’s taller than Keith in all the ways that Keith hates and he’s talking to Keith like he gives a fuck and Keith can _not_ handle this. Not here. Not now.

“What, were you expecting things to be different because we got drunk and talked about our feelings? Well, they’re not.”

“That’s not.” Lance stops, expression twisting into something Keith can’t decipher. “Not what I was trying to—“

“So what do you _want_ from me, Lance?”

Maybe it comes out with more flint than he’d meant. Maybe he’d wanted it that way.

Lance’s face goes carefully blank. Like he’s seeing Keith properly for the first time, down to the ugly, thorny core of him.

“Nothing, apparently. Let’s get this over with.” Lance pushes past Keith without another glance, and into the training room.

The door closes. The lights flicker out. Come to life again. And then they’re in the thick of it, from all sides.

\--

Around them, the simulation is booting up in images of swirling pixels and images that take shape and dimension. Cave walls, and outside, torrential fucking downpour. He feels the mud sliding beneath his feet, the heavy cloying smell of what smells like a hurricane that rages with a roar. His hair sticks to his face, plastered with hours of rainwater and he is suddenly bone achingly cold.

“Get to it, Paladins,” says Allura, from the not so distant intercom, before clicking off.

They’ve got a broken ship. A blaster. One med kit. And water is rising, quickly.

“I’m on it!” Pidge is already shouting above the rain and rumbling thunder, as Hunk laces his fingers boosts her upwards to crawl into the cockpit.

“We need to build a barricade in the mouth of the cave!” Keith shouts at Lance. “If the water rises too much, we’ll lose engine function and be fucked.”

“Thanks for that, Captain Obvious,” Lance says, but he follows suit, looking for rocks and branches to shift and build a barricade.

For how hard the four of them work, the situation begins to fall to shit pretty spectacularly. Water floods like it does in the desert, with nowhere to be soaked, it runs where gravity takes it. A near half hour of labor gives nothing more than a flimsy wall of rocks and branches where the water is still pushing through. The engine of the plane won’t even turn over, and the rain water is so cold that Pidge’s whole body trembles as she furiously tries to crank the wrench and connect wires.

And Lance, Lance hasn’t said a word to Keith. Won’t even look at Keith, except to work quickly, silently, dodging any contact with Keith as if it’s the last thing he wants to happen as they work together.

In a half an hour, they’ve very clearly run out of options, and it’s definitely not doing much for morale. In a half an hour, they’re exhausted, and the water is still slowly rising, enough that it’s soaked through their boots, pooling around their ankles.

“Did Allura say survival was even an option in the midst of all this?” Hunk shouts over a spectacular crackle of thunder, rain that seems to pour down impossibly louder, like a cascade of marbles on a hard wood floor.

“It better be!” Lance shouts back. “Is there a button we can press for a hint or something on how to get the hell out of here?” He stares at the cave ceiling. “I’m not playing any games where death is the only option.”

Forcing his jaw still to keep his teeth from chattering, Keith follows Lance’s gaze, going for cavalier and getting something else entirely. “Maybe that’s the whole point of the exercise. Facing death, knowing when to give up.”

Lance stares at him. “Jesus, who invited this ray of sunshine to the party.”

“Guys,” Pidge snaps. “Now’s not the time.”

It’s like that eye contact has unlocked the floodgates, like now that Lance is looking there’s no stopping himself. Maybe it’s because now’s not the time, maybe that’s exactly why Keith has to go and ruin everything. Because he’s never had enough of a reason to have something good without ripping it to pieces because he never knows how to have and protect a good thing in the first place. Lance is looking at him like he’s supposed to feel bad about something, like he should be apologizing, like—for the millionth time—Lance is expecting something of him.

Truth be told, Keith’s kind of sick of things being expected of him. Especially when he never gave any indication of giving anything in the first place.

“What is your problem?” He rounds on Lance. “Stop looking at me like that. You’re gonna pick a fight when we’re up to our knees in water and on the verge of dying?”

“The fact that you don’t know is _exactly_ my problem.”

“Everything’s gotta be a fucking joke with you, doesn’t it?”

“Haven’t I already answered this question at some point? _Yes_.”

Lightning rips through the black night sky like a jagged broken zipper. Keith has never seen Lance look so angry.

“Whatever.” Keith turns his back and tries to lift a heavy branch to hold up the dam. “I don’t have time to deal with your mood swings.”

“Oh, I forget.” Lance’s tone is a sarcasm that cuts, rather than annoys. Keith’s grip tightens on the branch. “You can’t talk about your feelings unless you’re drunk.”

Keith’s stomach hollows. He’s aware of Pidge and Hunk, not moving and now listening, a few feet away. “If you’ve got a point to all this, I suggest you get to it.”

“One of these days, your emotional constipation is going to get us killed. You can’t just”—lighting tears at the sky again, and Keith catches a glimpse of the twisted pain on Lance’s face—“push us away and think it’s not gonna bite us in the ass on a future mission.”

Keith lets go of the branch, and it slops in the water at his feet. “What are you even talking about? I’m the best fucking pilot out of all of you.” It makes Keith sound like more of an asshole than he means it to, but he doesn’t back down from it. He knows none of them can argue differently.

Doesn’t mean Lance isn’t gonna try.

“Best fucking pilot my _ass_. You’ve got good instincts but those doesn’t mean shit if you can’t think of something to get us out of this mess. But you’re too busy over here being brooding and going on about accepting death, whatever the hell that means.”

A feeling is building in Keith’s chest, but it isn’t the anger he’d been prepared to deal with. Like he’s trying to hold back a fighter jet from taking off with his fingertips. Like he wants to run. There’s an impossible forceful _thing_ inside him trying to break out, rattling against the cage of his ribs, his skin, the gritted teeth of every smile he’s ever faked.

How does a wild thing become unmade? How do you unstitch the very fabric of someone’s DNA, even if that same fabric is slowly killing them? How do you fix something that was born broke?

There’s no changing the nature of nature itself, no unwinding of time and evolution. You’re either a product of the environment you were born into or you were just born.

He’d never had to ask himself this question until it felt like it was screaming in his ears. Around them, the skies break open and the earth rises with a vengeance and cold encroaches like a virus, and Keith stares at Lance and knows, somehow, that Lance knows.

Keith is not a caring person. He’s not even a normal person. He can wear the sheep’s clothing and he can mingle with the rest of the sheep but at the end of the goddamn day he is still the wolf, the fox, the goddamn dumpster cat named Ginger. He is still a wild thing.

There’s no changing that nature. Not when he’s been like this for so long. There’s no fixing something that was born and grown broke.

“Again, I repeat, do you have a fucking _problem_ , Lance? If so, stow it, because we’re supposed to be fighting for our lives in here,” he snarls, picks up another branch that’s come off the dam and stuffs it against the barricade, heels slipping in the mud, relishing in the grime of it.

“Don’t know that I can do that when _you_ are the ‘fucking problem’.”

Keith turns on his heels, slipping a bit on the cave floor, splashing. “So what is it now, you don’t like my piloting skills either?”

“I don’t like the way your emotional issues seem to throw a wrench into everything.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know _exactly what I’m talking about_.” Lance is shouting now, voice hoarse in trying to drown out the noise around them.

“I’m not the one who keeps trying to off myself for attention every time things get dicey instead of keeping a cool head about it.” Keith reaches to the cave floor, tries to pack mud into the branches. The busy work keeps him calm, even as the fear threatens to tear through him another streak of lighting.

“Oh that’s _rich._ Is that what you think I’ve been doing? Playing at being the hero?”

Keith knows it's not. He knows that Lance is good and caring and a martyr to a fault. He knows that Lance loves most people more than he loves himself. That being the hero only matters to him because of the fact that it saves others.

But that fear bursts from him, and it’s run or be caught wanting to stay. It’s cut it off or let that affection grow until it kills him.

Keith knows its not. He nods anyhow. “Yeah. It is.”

Lance steps back, like he’s been wounded, breathing like Keith punched him. And then he’s rallying again, marching right up to Keith and jabbing him in the shoulder with an index finger. “This may not have occurred to you, but some of us have families we need to get back to. Some of us”—Lance inhales, as if to stoke flames—“have people who would miss us. But I guess you don’t know what that’s like, do you, Keith.”

He doesn’t even think, just swings his fist, lashing out like a cornered animal. Lance blocks it, eyes wide, and responds with a series of his own jabs and kicks that hit Keith a little too hard between his ribs. It starts like play fighting, testing boundaries, poking at each other with pins and needles but not enough to draw blood. But then Keith lands a cuff to Lance’s head that knocks sharply against his skull, shocks them both.

At the Garrison, there’d been a day where they’d been sent out to find land mines in a far off desert. Most of them were deactivated. But the occasional one would go off, and they weren’t to be carefree about it. Keith can remember the scorching sun. The sensors and delicate steps they took on the cracked mud of the desert floor. He can remember one of the mines going off, leaving a wreckage that they hadn’t seen coming, hadn’t even known how it came to be.

Here, with Lance, covered head to toe in mud, Keith can’t see where the wreckage between them ends or begins. He just knows it's there. It’s gone off. There’s no pretending it hasn’t. What had started as their standard bicker and banter became something so ugly Keith doesn’t have a name for it, only that it’s bleeding, and bruised, and raw. And that he’s going to cauterize it, burn it into numbness, before it hurts anymore.

“You’re a piece of shit, Lance,” Keith heaves. “You are really—“

“Takes one to know one,” Lance says, and tackles Keith to the ground.

Nothing about this is taunting or teasing. Nothing about this is playing around anymore. Nothing about this is game. Maybe about this never was. There’s mud on their armor and they tumble like dogs fighting for scraps, snarling, fighting dirty. Lance has got his fists curled around Keith’s shoulders, pinned him down in the mud, but Keith rolls them over, slamming his head into the ground. There’s mud in Keith’s mouth and he can feel harsh pants from Lance on his face and makes to put his fist _there_ when rough hands grab him and swing him off.

“Keith.” Shiro’s voice is a warning and his arm is a vice but Keith worms out from under him, pushing him away. The mud and the cold and the rising water are gone. It is just the training room. It’s just Pidge and Hunk, looking shaken.

It’s just Lance, on the floor, the breath knocked out of him, with blood on his mouth that Keith can’t remember putting there.

The room is silent. No one moves.

Lance stares up at Keith, eyes wide. “I’ll never be good enough, will I?”

It coasts through Keith like a wave, the anger, the incredulity, and the fear. He’s got momentum enough that he could tackle Lance all over again, but he doesn’t. He just stands, opens the door to the cage.

“No,” Keith says to the floor, because he’s a coward, because he’s ugly, because he’s only ever been good at being the one who walks away first. “No, you won’t.”

He watches, sick to his stomach, as the words land on Lance, telegraph through him like a blow, folding him inwards. The sting of it ripples over his face, in the bitter and warped smile on his face.

Lance breathes deeply, as if pushing the air through a wound, inhaling through the pain, and rises. His exit is quiet. He doesn’t look at any of them. He lets Keith have the final word, leaves him to deal with the mess of the wreckage.

 

\--

Here’s the thing.

Wild things can bite. Cause pain. And sometimes, wild things get bitten in return. Sometimes they get hurt, and the wound heals wrong, the skin grows back thicker, more mangled. Broken fingers become claws. When you don’t clean the wound before you stitch it up, when you forget to set the fingers correctly in their splint, the body recovers in what ways it can, desperate to survive above all else. It grows around the pain, and it keeps going.

In Pre-AP Biology at Colburn High School Keith and his freshman classmates learned about a survival based adaptation in which certain animals could regrow limbs. Lizards who regrew tails after losing them. Starfish re-growing limbs. But sometimes one tail came back as two, or one missing arm became five. As if, in a response to the harsh eat-or-be-eaten reality of nature, their bodies responded with over compensation.

“Mr. Kogane.”

He got called to the guidance counselor’s office maybe a week after that lecture, and he couldn’t stop thinking about those lizards with two tails. His mouth was bleeding. He couldn’t see out his left eye. Mr. Bennett, who hated his job almost as much as Keith hated sitting in his office, was watching him over the desk. The swamp cooler rattled in the silence between them.

“What’s wrong, Mr. Kogane?” This question, of course, came after Keith had been dragged off the quarterback of the football team, after Keith had bled all over his t-shirt and jacket. After he’d already been slapped with a Saturday detention and a three-day suspension.

What’s wrong, Mr. Kogane? Keith could laugh at the irony.

All his past therapists, they asked this same round of repeated questions, scripted inquiries that he had memorized by heart by the time he reached his early teens. He never answered them in a way that was straightforward. But sometimes he hears them in a repeating mantra, because as he has learned by now, some scars don’t fade.

How are you feeling? Why did you do that? Why are you angry? How can I help?

“Isn’t it obvious?”

Mr. Bennett leans back in his chair. “There’s no need to be hostile, Mr. Kogane. Tell me what happened.”

“Your high school quarterback and his teammates held me down and punched me after they graffitied ‘faggot’ on my locker.”

“Was the fight provoked?”

“I told them not to write faggot on my locker, and they held me down and punched me.”

Death throes of the swamp cooler continue. Mr. Bennett watches Keith. Keith thinks of those thrashing lizard tails.

“Well, is it true?”

Lip stinging, Keith frowns. “Is what true?”

“What they wrote on your locker, is it true?”

Discomfort swirled, hot like melted wax, dripping into his stomach drop by burning drop. What the fuck did that have to do with it? There was not much to be said or done when you were young and feeling like your heart was was born with a genetic defect. After suffering through enough public school sex education to know that boys are meant to want girls.

It was simple evolution, adapt or perish tactics. His heart had been wounded earlier on in his life and now it beat wrong, loved wrong. That was his logic around it, at the very least.

Mr. Bennett sighed, like the lack of angry denial is a huge disappointment to him.

“Do you want to get married one day, Mr. Kogane? Have kids?”

He shrugged on autopilot, didn’t know how else to get through this conversation as fast as possible.

“Having three little tykes myself, I’ll tell you that one day you will.” Mr. Bennet smiled like he was chewing on broken glass. “One day you’re going to look back at this foolish prank and laugh about it. But for now, keep your head down. And don’t do anything or be anyone that might cause any more problems.”

Quietly, without making a move or sound, Keith severed parts of himself into neat sections. Discarded the dead appendages, cauterized the internal bleeding. Knew they would grow back mangled, because pain like this, loneliness like this, never did anyone any good.

Knew he’d be stronger for it.

“And no more fights, Mr. Kogane. Am I understood?”

Snip snip. Just like all those routine haircuts over the years. And just like that, he made room for the white picket fence life that the guidance counselor painted for him. Shoved aside the notion of waking up one morning next to a body he loves, a smile he wants to kiss. It was never going to be a woman, and so now it would be no one.

“Kogane?” Mr. Bennett snapped, limited patience already run out. “Am I understood?”

Heart still, somehow, beating, Keith kept his eyes down as he responded. He gripped the edge of the chair, it was the only thing keeping him from sprinting away from the room, the town, the whole fucking planet.

“Yes sir. Crystal, sir.”

 

\--

Unfortunately for Keith, they’re not afforded the time and luxury of nursing their wounds, and it becomes painfully obvious that they are deep wounds at that. Lance isn’t angry and Lance isn’t sad and Lance isn’t _anything_ because Lance isn’t Lance. He’s cold and aloof and doesn’t smile and he’s everything Keith had thought would be for the best. When Keith enters the room, he walks out. When they’re partnered for a training exercise, he does so without commentary, doesn’t stick around for jokes or recaps after. He’s efficient, he’s a good pilot, and he’s the most distant thing in entire world.

In short, he’s the Lance that Keith thought he’d wanted since the beginning, but Keith is an idiot, and Keith hates himself, and this really has become just one whole clusterfuck of a mess.

That worst part of it all is that Keith really isn’t sorry. He kind of hates himself for that, too.

He’s taken to avoiding Lance just so Lance doesn’t have to avoid him. He really can’t take the way Lance will just drop off into blankness whenever he enters the room.

But again, he’s not afforded the luxury of getting to sift through his own self pity and guilt. There’s a universe they’ve got to save, after all.

“Paladins.” Allura’s voice clicks onto the intercom. “We’ve received a distress call. Come to the bridge immediately.”

As soon as they enter the room, she faces them all in person, expression grave and intent.

“I received a message from a mining vessel, just of the edge of the Aimeridian Galaxy. They’ve been attacked by the Galra, and left stranded in the middle of space. Their ship is—as a whole—undamaged. But their life support systems are down, there are a hundred people on board, and they need our help. They fear that if they leave in their escape pods they’ll be attacked. These aren’t soldiers. They’re families. Women and children. But that’s not all.” Allura frowns. “The transmission I received mentions that in the command center is hidden Intel that could weaken the Galra. A way to take down Zarkon for good.”

The barest scent of victory springs forth in the air, they all feel it.

“I know given our recent missions the risk may not seem worth it,” Allura presses, “but this could be our chance to really make a difference. Hit the Galra empire where it hurts, even if only temporarily. If there’s intel on that ship that could destroy Zarkon...”

“We can’t pass it up,” Shiro finishes. Beside him, Pidge has her hands balled into fists at her sides, and Keith knows she’s thinking of Matt. “We have to rescue them.”

Hunk shifts restlessly. “Is anyone else getting a bit of a trap-y vibe? Anyone? Because this definitely feels like a trap.”

“It’s very possible.” Shiro crosses his arms. “The Galra take prisoners. They don’t leave survivors unless they either escaped, or there’s another motivation for it.”

There is a pregnant pause, as everyone’s eyes flick over Shiro’s arm.

“Even if it is,” he presses on, “we can’t just leave those people to slowly suffocate to death. They’re scared, and they need our help. We have to get them out, regardless of the risks, even if we don’t get the intel.”

“Oh, we’ll get the Intel.” Pidge says darkly. “Don’t you worry about that.”

“So we get out, we get the passengers, and we don’t get our hands dirty, just in case there’s no trap,” Keith says. “Simple, painless recon.”

He’s aware, acutely so, of Lance shifting on his feet just behind him, but Lance says nothing, and no one breaks in with a motion of protest other than nodding in agreement. They’re afraid, of course they are, but this is what they’ve been working towards. They’re not about to walk away.

Shiro shoulders forward. “Alright team, let’s map out a plan, and then head to the shuttle bay.”

\--

The Aimeridian Galaxy is a rather boring galaxy by any stretch of the imagination. They encounter little turbulence and encounter little resistance by way of electrical storms or asteroid belts.

The plan is simple: they station the castle in space behind the planet of Monina, a large desert planet with dust storms and winds that will cloak the castles appearance. Coran will stay behind to receive any and all passengers, and provide extra defense if needed, should the Galra decide to reappear. The rest of them will split up into three duos.

Allura with Shiro, to collect and escort the passengers to their escape pods. Pidge with Hunk, to gather what Intel they can from the mining vessel’s helm. Keith with Lance, to scout the ship for any stray passengers, or Galra that may have decided to stick around.

Neither of them argues with the assignments in the middle of the briefing, but Keith doesn’t miss the downward crease of Lance’s mouth when Allura tells them anyway.

“I don’t want any unnecessary risks. And it is because of this that we will use our jets instead of our lions. The last thing we need to do hand deliver Voltron straight to the enemy’s hands. If it _is_ a trap, and the Galra are just waiting us to fly right in, we won’t have much of a chance to escape.” Allura’s eyes are fiercely bright, not excited but electrified, body held in a warrior’s stance as she speaks, “And as much as I love to entertain guests in the castle, I don’t want any of us being at the mercy and leisure of the enemy any time soon.”

If her eyes flick over them and linger a bit longer on Lance than the others, it’s only because Keith has unconsciously shifted to put himself between them. As if the very mention of the last time Lance was hurt is threat enough.

“We do our jobs, and we get everyone out using the escape pods, and then we get the hell out before anyone knows they’re there. We have no definite window for how much time we have to get in and out, but we’ll assume that the quicker we move, the better. The more time we linger, the more likely it is that they notice. If Galra ships are out and about, they’ll be looking for us. So we have to be ready to adapt. And we have to be ready to fight, if it comes to that. With our lions, if the attack happens after we’ve left the vessel. Without them, if before.”

Allura finishes speaking, and silence falls in the room.

Shiro steps forward, gentler than Allura, but just as strong. “This is what we’ve trained for, team. We don’t need to be Voltron to save the galaxy, not always. We can do this.”

Silence persists still.

Keith wants to add encouraging words on top of that, but he doesn’t have them. He’s too busy thinking about how much his old classmates would kill to know that Kogane won the dead pool after all.

“You’re right.” It’s Lance, of fucking course it’s Lance, who steps forward to speak. It’s the first time he’s made a sound since Allura started talking about the distress call hours ago. But it’s as if he’d been offering the encouragement the whole time, those blue eyes full of hope and determination. Those same eyes barely skip over Keith, but Keith’s heart gives a great big kick anyhow. It’s the most interaction they’ve had in days. He looks at the rest of the team, hands on his hips, and smiles roguishly. “Let’s go kick some Galra ass.”

The team cheers and each duo heads for a jet, turning on the engines and checking fuel levels, communication functions, firepower.

Keith focuses too intently on the controls. All the things he screamed at Lance seem to be expanding like bacteria in mass, sitting between them on the small jet like a giant fucking elephant in the room that feels too dangerous to address, but too obvious to ignore. These waters haven’t even begun to settle.

Worst of all, despite the fact that they’re about to go and risk their lives for the greater good all over again, or maybe because of it, he can feel Lance’s expectant gaze on him more than ever as they suit up. But Keith can’t properly respond to it with a way that doesn’t end in more vicious insults. He doesn’t know how.

“We’re only going to have an brief window of time to get everyone off that ship before we draw attention, especially if it’s a trap,” Shiro speaks first on the comms, giving Keith a temporary distraction, “Once you’ve got your assigned quadrant of the ship, you get back to your jet and head back to the castle. No sticking around. We want in and out, fast and untraceable.”

The mission is simple.

Simple, but there are so many many things that could go wrong.

“You can do this, Paladins.” Allura says the words with such _certainty_ , Keith almost believes her. The pre-mission anxiety churning at the end of his nerves abates just a bit. “You’re more than the abilities of your lions. Voltron would not exist without _you_ as the pilots. Failure has never been an option for us, and it will not be now.”

They double-check helmet pressure levels and body armor, strapping themselves into the cockpit as silence weighs heavily in the charged air on the comms. Coran prepares to open the air lock.

When they strap into their seats, Lance doesn’t even protest when Keith takes the pilot’s seat. The elephant in the cockpit triples in size.

“You ready?” Keith asks in what he hopes is a flippant tone.

The look he earns for it is a quick glance of something that slips right into impassive, another short glimpse of a Lance that Keith so badly wants to be close to, but also can’t resist warding off with a fucking metaphorical stick.

“Born ready, baby,” Lance says, in a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes behind the glass of his helmet.

Shiro gives the signal, the air lock opens with a deafening howl of space, and they’re off.

\--

From as far back as Keith can remember—joining the army, training at the Garrison, climbing through the Cadet ranks to the fighter pilot class—he can remember being told he had good instincts. For the longest time instincts had just appeared to be ‘common fucking sense’, anyone could have instincts if they just put their minds to it. When asked by awestruck or jealous classmates, flabbergasted flight instructors, how he did certain things, Keith never had an answer, because it just seemed so obvious to him. Instincts only ever felt like the simple task of preparing for the worst, and not expecting anything better. Of knowing when it was time to go, and always be bracing yourself for that moment.

He understands now that not everyone’s lived the life he’s lived. And it’s not supposed to be natural, preparing for that much disaster.

As they creep onto the stranded ship, land their jets right into the gaping hole of the abandoned docking port, Keith wishes he didn’t have instincts. Every cell of him is standing at attention, strung taut like a bowstring, drawing back, back, back, with no release in sight.

“If their life support systems are failing, they’ll be in the centermost part of the ship, trying to conserve oxygen,” Shiro says on comms, all six of them closing the airlock and heading for the main atrium. “Let’s get to it, gang.”

They nod at each other, and split into separate directions. Pidge and Hunk take a sharp right, disappearing into the shadows and dimly lit halls. Shiro and Allura heading down a flight of stairs at the next bend, which leaves Keith and Lance, pacing the circular main hallway alone.

For how simple this mission appeared to have been on the surface, the atmosphere sure works to create quite the opposite feeling. The remaining engine power is barely enough to keep the lights flickering, a pale and sickly yellow saturation, like something straight out of a horror movie.

Beside him, he can hear the quickened breathing of Lance, footfalls tentative and echoing. Foreboding creeps after them on light feet, rafters torn down, ceilings with holes blasted in them. They have no way of knowing whether Galra stepped foot on this ship or not. There are no bodies to count, no blood spatters. Just silence, and smoking equipment, sparks bursting from frayed wires that dangle from the ceiling of the hallways like spilled entrails, almost all the vital machinery of the ship gutted and torn out by blasters.

He’s got no way of knowing if the others are alright, it was agreed that the quieter they were, the safer it might be. Yet anxiety continues to twine inside of him without end or release. He grips his bayard tighter, slides closer to Lance in the hallway. It’s like being pulled in two separate directions, drawn and quartered, the tension of the situation, and the tension with Lance, slicing him into distracted pieces.

When Allura’s voice crackles briefly onto the comm, it bursts the bubble with the slightest prickle of relief. Keith cranes his neck as if he can detect any amount of stress in her voice, but she sounds fine, if a little bit urgent.

“We found the passengers in the main sleeping quarters, central most part of the ship. Leading them to escape pods as quick as possible. Report, Paladins.”

“Control room is torn to bits,” Hunk wires in. “We’re salvaging what we can for information, where the attack might have come from, what direction, but it’s like piecing back together a shattered vase. There might not be anything to work with.”

“Get what you can, and get out,” Allura commands. “Don’t linger, not even for a second. Lance, Kei—”

“We’re here,” Lance says, voice at odds with its usual levity. “We don’t see any signs of Galra boarding, but we’re keeping an eye out. We’ll let you know the second we see something.”

Keith nods in support, as if Allura can hear the gesture, and they trek off. The ship is circular, a larger ring surrounding a sphere of an engine, like a mini mechanical Saturn. They walk forward in the dark, until Lance stops him near the entrance near the engine room, gathers something dark off the ground. Their eyes have adjusted, but dark follows them like a tangible thing, and Keith feels inclined to almost shy away from it.

There’s a sharp crack like a breaking bone, and purple light bursts from Lance’s hands.

“Where did you get that?” Keith whispers, and Lance just shrugs, pointing to the floor. There are a few of them, scattered on the floor. Discarded weapons. Laser cartridges. Reloads for weapons. But no bodies. No sign of actual Galra on the ship. Just a sense of foreboding, like the smell of rain before the coming storm.

“Keith.” Allura’s voice bursts over the comms again. “One of the passengers says that they were boarded.”

“They may have been, but they’ve left now,” Keith whispers back. “There isn’t a soul on this ship. We haven’t even seen passengers. I think the Galra have left.”

Silence again, and then Allura says. “That may be true. But keep your eyes open. And hurry back. We’ve almost got everyone off the ship.”

“Do you think she’s right?” Lance asks a moment later, rounding the corner with Keith. It’s one of the first times Lance has addressed Keith and is actually looking at him, the waters still for now. It’s a bit difficult to remember why they were fighting in the first place. Or rather, why Keith had pushed him so viciously away.

There is self-preservation to be had at keeping people at arm’s length. But when they were like this, side by side, working together, a team, it becomes difficult for Keith to remember why he was even doing it in the first place.

“I feel like we would have seen them by now. Seen someone. Place is as empty as a ghost town.” There aren’t that many rooms. An army could not hide _that_ easily, not in a ship like this.

No. No, they must have turned tail the second they saw the ship drawing closer, maybe picked up the radar of the castle on their scanners and fled. Galra may be confrontational, but Keith imagines not all of them are as blood thirsty and confrontational as Zarkon. This still might be a low-key mission yet.

And then, just as quickly as he begins to relax, he tenses up all over again. A murmur, a scuffling of movement far down the corridor, barely loud enough to pick up. It’s more a movement of air, reverberation on the sound barrier rather than an actual sound, but Keith feels it like blood in his veins, the rush of something wrong, something off.

Something coming.

“Do you think—”

“Shut up.” Keith grabs Lance and yanks him into a side nook in the wall, holds a finger over his own helmet in a gestured command of silence and presses him as far out of visibility range as he can.

“Keith, _what_.”

“Hush.”

Around them, the light of the glow stick in Lance’s hand hits all the planes of his face, casting them in a pale purple light of Galra quintessence. There’s no mistaking the blue of Lance’s eyes though, so blue they could almost be violet, so blue they could be Keith’s own. Lance’s eyes are wide, and afraid. Keith is straining his ears to see if the sound continues, but there’s not much he can do while he’s pinning Lance against the wall, while he’s pressing his body against Lance’s so he sits still. He waits. He doesn’t move. He tries, for an agonizing moment, to find anywhere to look at rather than Lance.

He can’t describe the noise he heard. Whether it was a footfall or a ragged breath. Just knows he heard it, a shuddering on the plane of sound that put him on high alert.

The dark around them seems to creep in, and with every passing moment that that quintessence throbs with feeble light, Keith again feel his instincts pulling tighter, getting ready to run.

Silence. The noise has vanished. The groaning of the ship has gone quiet again. Only their breaths. The rabbiting of Keith’s heartbeat in his ears.

Keith opens his mouth to say something, probably along the lines of ‘we should go’ or ‘let’s get back to the others’ there’s a clanging and echoing throughout the ship, like atonal church bells, overlapping and increasing in their volume, from all angles and directions.

Whatever it was. It’s moving again. And it’s getting closer. He strains, trying to hear what direction of the hallway the sound is coming from but it’s all around them, impossible to track the movement of.

“Keith,” Lance says in a whisper, the tone sending a skittering of chills down the back of Keith’s neck, “they’re in the _walls_.”

In seconds, Keith’s pulled them away from the nook they’d hid in and drawn his sword, flicked his wrist to open his shield, turned and planted his back against Lance’s. There’s the telltale hum of Lance’s blaster booting up and a soft muttered curse on the comms that could be either of them, and then silence. Silence that seems to consume the space around them like acid.

“Got your six,” Lance whispers.

“You too.”

With a screech of tearing metal and an explosion like a bomb, the walls burst apart, and the Galra come stepping through. They unfold like cards from a deck, one by one by one, until Lance and Keith are all but surrounded. The odds aren’t impossible. But they aren’t exactly great, either.

“Jeez, guess these guys excelled at cars in Clown College.” Lance checks the safety on his blaster, shit eating grin plastered across his face in all its glory.

Keith doesn’t know whether he wants to kiss him or kill him.

There isn’t time to decide either way. The Galra are on them in a heartbeat, and all hell breaks loose.

He’s put in the hours of rigorous training, they all have. But battle is still just as a bewildering blur as it was the first time he entered it, no time for thought apart from dodge, parry, slash, block, duck, and stab. The only awareness that exists outside of the next enemy to fight is of Lance behind him, releasing a bellicose cry as he pulls the trigger. The sound would be almost comical, if they weren’t fighting for their very lives.

Keith doesn’t allow himself to think about the others, to worry if they’re facing the same sort of attack from all sides. He worries about his own skin, and he worries about Lance’s.

It’s all too easy to forget—from the bickering and the getting under each other’s skin and everything else in between—exactly what a dynamic duo they are.

Keith is fast, but Lance is continuous. He moves like electric current through the Galra soldiers, fluid and fierce as a river’s tide, with no boundaries or dam to stop him as he tucks, rolls, and comes up shooting. His mouth is set in a thin line of concentration and his frame moves as seamlessly as a dancer’s, undeniable, unpredictable, wave after wave of blasts that push their enemies back and cover Keith’s vulnerable spots.

“Paladins!” Allura’s voice bursts in their ears like a war cry. “We’re taking off with the passengers. A Galra ship has begun firing, there’s no time to waste! We’ll soon be out of range for communications, and up to our ears in laser cannons. Get back to your jets _immediately._ That’s an order!”

“Roger that!” Hunk shouts.

They could, probably should, call for backup. But if there are Galra outside as well as in, Keith knows they can’t take the risk of all getting trapped. All it takes a brief second of eye contact Lance to know he agrees. They’ll catch up.

“We gotta clear out of here.” Lance has to shout over the sound of blaster rays and melting ship parts around them. “We’ve got no clue how many other Galra are on this ship!”

“There’s an door back there that should lead back to the pods. Power’s down, but I bet we can yank it wide enough to squeeze through. You go, get the door open, I’ll cover you.”

“Just one sec,” Lance says, as if he’s serving a tennis ball rather than several rounds of precision laser beams through the chests of Galra soldiers. He drops five of them in a second, and for just a second, the circle surrounding them is weakened. Quicker then lighting, they weave through, Lance firing and Keith slashing from the sides, until it’s an army on one side, the door on the other, seeming a million miles away.

And really, it’s probably the worst thing to be doing given the particular mood of the moment, but it’s Lance, and Lance is anything if ill-timed and difficult. He smiles sideways, that crooked flash of teeth and says, “Race ya?”

“Idiot,” Keith retorts, and they’re off, the heat of lasers biting at their heels as they sprint to the locked door.

Lance hands Keith his blaster wordlessly as soon as they get to it, and Keith retracts his shield, shifts his stance in front of Lance, facing off with the Galra like an angry grizzly bear. They are tall and they’ve got more weapons but Keith is pissed off and revved up, almost feeling peaceful, like his body was made for the unlivable extraordinary circumstances, made for both fight and flight but nothing else in between.

He smiles hungrily. Come and get it, motherfuckers.

There’s less than a dozen Galra left, but Keith’s shoulders are already burning with exertion. He’s hot all over, the air inside his suit stifled with sweat and body heat. Slowly, in tandem, they back up towards the nearest closed door, Keith covering Lance as Lance pries the door open, groaning and straining as he throws his whole weight into it.

“You go through!” He presses his back to one doorjamb and his foot to the other, wedging himself and creating an opening between his legs for Keith to duck between. “C’mon! I can’t hold these much longer, Keith!”

Keith wrenches his sword from a Galra’s ribs with a sickening _crunch_ and spatter, thick black blood smearing on his armor, and kicks the corpse into the remaining soldiers behind it. Using sense more than sight, he ducks under Lance’s leg, firing shots with a blind eye behind him, getting a sick sense of pleasure at the guttural noises of pain and the slumping of bodies. The door slams shut with a gust of relief from Lance and together they tumble into the empty hallway, recover in slow breaths.

He straightens, the horizon feel of victory rising in his chest. They’ve just got to run and hop in the pod and they’ll be out of here in no time flat.

“Keith…”

As if there’s an airlock in his sternum, all the air and victory sucks out of Keith’s body. Lance stands, hand clutched to his left shoulder, red seeping between his fingers.

Blast shots ring out against the other side of the door. Keith wants to throw himself through it and let all the shots hit him. He deserves it for every drop of blood that’s pattering on the floor. He was supposed to have Lance’s back.

They stare at each other.

“It’s not bad,” Lance says, but it’s clear that it is, lines of distress painting the picture of the wound without Keith having to even look at it. It doesn’t stop Keith from stalking forward in a heartbeat to look it over anyhow. “Really, it’s not—”

“Can you still shoot?”

Lance doesn’t hesitate before nodding, which is how Keith knows it’s really bad. They’ve got a few minutes of a window, and then it’s go for broke for the escape route.

“I need to put pressure on this.” He unbuckles the armor around his thigh and snatches the burgundy bandana from his pocket, the only real totem he owns besides the red and white jacket that he left at the castle. “It’s not gonna be fun, but it’ll staunch the bleeding until we get back to the castle.”

Lance unstraps his chest plate and holds out his arm like a broken bird would its wing, awkward and pained, wincing as Keith twists his bandana tight, loops it around. The wound is bleeding, an ugly gape of burned flesh that’s spilling red, not so badly that they’re in immediate peril, but enough that it’s going to be worrisome in a few hours time if Lance doesn’t slow the process now.

“Try not to yell too much,” Keith mutters, looping in the beginnings of a knot. “Just close your eyes and think of England.”

“Wha—hnng.” Lance’s question cuts off when Keith pulls the knot tight, cutting off the blood flow like they’d taught them at the Garrison for emergency situations. “Fuck. Fucking shit. Jesus fucking _Christ_ fuck.”

The curses taper off into whimpers, which is quickly becoming Keith’s least favorite sound in the entire universe, but by the time Keith grabs his good hand and hauls him upright, Lance’s jaw is set and determined once more, if just the slightest bit pale. Keith straps back on his armor for him, careful of the wound and the tender way in which Lance winces at any pressure.

“I think the others are gone by now.” Keith says. “Which means the Galra will have noticed the jets leaving and will try to head us off there. We should go.”

The ship lurches suddenly, and in the distance they can hear the zing of laser cannon blast.

They take off in a direction jogging, Keith only glancing back once to see the choice few drops of Lance’s blood, stamped on the floor by their overlapping footprints.

\--

Things, despite already being pretty bad, take a miraculous turn for the worst. The mining vessel lurches and tips as blaster shots hit the surface, and Keith can’t see the battle being waged outside but he can tell it’s not pretty.

When they pass a viewing deck of the ship, the space outside the ship is lit with blaster rays and laser canons. He can see the lions; green yellow and black, circling the Galra ship, protecting the escape pods as they slowly drift off into space. Pandemonium has reared its ugly head in what is supposed to be an in and out mission. From the brief glance Keith gets, Coran had to officially intervene with the big guns. The enemy is small, doesn’t look to be Zarkon, or a larger part of the imperial army, which is a relief, but they’re still—for the time—in danger. Lance is bleeding and Keith is exhausted and they really do need to get to their jet before this entire goddamn ship explodes.

“Our jet—,” Lance says, the two of them rounding the corner to the airlock only to find their getaway plane smashed to smithereens. “Fuck. We’re going to have to—”

“The escape pods.” Keith turns heel. “We should be able to pilot it and head for the castle. They’re not too far.”

“Right,” Lance huffs, and Keith notices that his bandana is soaked dark with blood already. “Let’s hop to it.

It feels too long of a trek to be safe, but they make it to the escape pods without running into more enemy soldiers or getting a laser canon tearing the hull of the vessel open and sucking them out into space, so that’s something.

Lance is lagging behind slightly, the pain showing itself in his labored breath, the scarce trail of drops of blood every few feet or so, but he says nothing, keeps his eyes locked on the destination where a last escape pod is already open when they get to it. Even from here they can see the open entrance, the control panel sparking with what looks to be wires shredded apart.

They don’t even see it coming. One second Keith is staring at the sparking control panel, the next he’s shoving Lance behind him, body a furious shield to face whatever’s coming for them.

Keith barely even tightens his grip on his bayard before the Galra grabs him by the neck like he’s a rag doll and _hurls_ him across the room, head slamming back against a steel beam. Stars burst behind his eyes and he blinks, trying to clear his vision, room tilting slightly sideways. He probably has a concussion, and that’s probably not a very good thing, but the Galra is advancing on Lance, who’s scrambling backwards.

From where he lies on the ground, Keith hurls his sword with all his strength, feels the tendons in his neck and shoulder scream at the overextension, and the sword buries itself in the Galra’s thigh. It stumbles, slowed, but continues advancing on Lance with hands outstretched, sharp canines as it smiles, like it finds Lance amusing.

“You humans are so weak. Even for Paladins.”

A pause, a flicker of an expression, and then Lance smiles widely.

“Eat my ass, you ugly alien motherfucker.” Lance’s grin has a nasty edge, and then he swings out his bayard from behind his back and pumps the Galra with so much laser fire that Keith can see through the hole in his chest by the time it slumps to the ground, dead.

Lance kicks the Galra’s feet out of the pod’s doorway, wrenches Keith’s sword out of the Galra’s thigh and turns to the control panels. “Get in here! I can’t do this alone!”

Keith staggers to his feet and stumbles like a blind man, dazed, into the escape pod. Lance is all business where he was cocky cool just moment before, frowning at what looks like a bunch of fried buttons.

The ship gives a hideous shudder as more laser blasts hit it, and Lance punches the accelerator, taking off. There’s no time to take inventory before they hit orbit.

“Looks like he blasted half the vital controls, so we can’t really fly this, but no worries. I’m plotting coordinates for the nearest stable planet. We’ll turn on the homing signal and the others will find us. The castle will pick it up. In a few hours time we’ll touch down and everything will be fine.”

He’s not wrong. The control panel has been smashed to smithereens. But it’s not the only thing that’s been smashed beyond repair. Keith’s insides curdle. His hands go cold.

“And… goddammit, he ripped out the life support system too, what an asshole.” Lance swears. “No matter. We’ve got respirators in our suits. We should be fine as long as—“

“My helmet.” Keith says the words numbly.

Lance looks up mid sentence, and his words deflate into shocked silence. Silence in which the unmistakable sound of air leakage through the jagged crack across Keith’s helmet can be plainly heard.

For a solid thirty seconds, neither of them speaks. Space swirls around them, the battle farther away, like a fourth of July fireworks show.

Keith doesn’t have to check to know that there’s less than half a tank of reserve oxygen left in his helmet, plus whatever’s in the air in here. It’s enough that he knows it won’t last. There’s no telling how much they’ve got in quantity, but it’s enough that he’ll be dead likely before they even land.

He looks at Lance, shaken to his core, as if suddenly Lance is the only one who’s got the answer to all the questions Keith needs to ask.

“Don’t talk. Save your breath,” Lance says, cutting off the thought before Keith can voice it. He frowns, and because he cannot pace, he sits across from Keith, rubbing at his temples. “I’m thinking. I’ll figure something out. We’ll find a way out of this.”

It’s the first time that Keith’s actually having trouble with the whole not talking thing. He thinks of the rest of the team, probably wondering where the fuck they are, then thinks of the battle raging behind them, keeping their team occupied, and he begins to actually shake.

“They think we’re on our way. They don’t know we’re here,” Keith says softly, the desperation of the situation sinking into his marrow, weighing him down. “They’re not going to realize we’re gone for at least another hour, until they’ve finished fighting off the Galra, if they even win and by then—”

“By then we’ll have found a way to save our asses. C’mon, Keith, work with me man. You’re the best at _everything_ , you’ve never not beat the odds!”

It seems a bit of a broad statement. Keith is best at leaving, best at starting over, best at hurting with minimal effort and best at flying. Keith had survival instincts, but Keith has never really had a will to survive.           

“I—” Keith stops, words held fast in his throat. He can’t stop shaking.

He had been in the desert for months. There had been days when he forgot to eat, or drink, too paralyzed to get out of bed and it hadn’t killed him. Like there had been some kind of fucked up gene that _insisted_ he keep going. For so long Keith more or less hadn’t minded the possibility of being dead and now that he was here staring it down there was nothing he could have minded more.

He had, after all, always wanted to brush his fingertips amongst the stars.

“Lance…”

“Sh. Shut up. I’m thinking.” Lance turns away, catty all over again. “Stop wasting breath, shut up and let me think.”

So Keith sits, crosses his legs, tries his best to regulate heart beat and slow breathing like they’d learned in the Garrison Emergency Situation training. How to stay calm even as you died, as peaceful as sleeping, if not moreso. He breaks himself down molecule by molecule, chases the fear in his veins and kills it dead, until he’s got the strength to open his eyes and look outward, take in what will be his final moments.

He watches Lance, fidgeting and restless and alive, and it calms him more, commits to memory the planes and shape of his face, the angle of that argumentative jaw, the exact shape of that willful mouth. He lets himself acknowledge the embarrassing fact of how very badly he wants to put his mouth on each part of Lance he categorizes.

Time passes, undeniable and demanding. With it, Keith can feel the change in the air as the oxygen begins to lessen even further, the air getting thinner, shallower in his lungs. Smaller breaths. Faster heartbeats. His head hurts. He doesn’t fight it. Doesn’t look away.

He doesn’t have time to say all the things he wants to say to Lance. There’s no time.

“You’re still bleeding,” Keith says, stupidly, and reaches forward to the exposed wound. Lance must have removed the armor surrounding it at some point while Keith was staring. There’s a whole lot of red. “C’mere.”

Lance looks like he wants to resist, but there isn’t anywhere to run in such close quarters. He holds his arm out gingerly, trying to school his face into something more passive as Keith does his best attempt at cleaning a wound with nothing but his own grimy bloody hands. The bandage is holding, slowing the bleeding somewhat, but leaving the wound oozing enough that Lance isn’t safe from danger entirely. Enough that when all this is over, he’ll need to rest easy, probably spend some time in the healing pod. Keith presses his fingers to the hot brown skin, staring at the give of the muscle, the way Lance’s blood looks on the whorls of his own fingerprints.

He will die like this. Boy with the red jacket. Blood of the Blue Paladin on his hands.

Fuck, now the oxygen deprivation has got him thinking in poetry. Fantastic.

“Lance.” His voice comes out breathless, like he’s been running. “Hey. Look at me.”

Lance looks at him. And at once Keith regrets everything he’s ever done to bring about such a similar expression of pain. He feels laid bare, but really, this is for the best, is what he’s trying to tell Lance in this moment of eye contact. It is not something so easily put into words, and maybe that’s why he’s sitting, mouth soundless.

He’s getting delirious, he knows, but he tries for conveying it all in a look. This will hurt the team, the mission. Keith dying will wound Voltron irrevocably. Keith is, or had been, after all, their most valuable pilot. Their weapon, their—

“No.” Lance’s voice is flat, his expression one of such outright stubbornness that Keith would laugh if he had the air for it. “You are the best pilot we have. Hell, the best fighter too.”

“Guess you’ll finally have me beat then, eh?” Keith wheezes, almost a whisper, and Lance’s stubbornness drops off into such a look of horror that Keith immediately regrets it. He leans back against the wall of the pod, retreating from Lance in the only direction he can go, blinking sweat out of his eyes.

He sees something flicker over Lance’s face, and the Lance sighs with his whole body, leans back against the wall opposite of Keith. His leg stretched out and pressed against Keith’s, the contact a passed olive branch, a grudging acceptance of the moments to come. Keith is going to die. They can’t stop it. This is fine.

Everything will be alright.

Keith had become a pilot on the sole promise that it was dangerous and likely to get him dead before he ever really lived. He hadn’t expected to dread it so much as he does in this moment.

Black spots are encroaching in Keith’s periphery. He nudges his knee to Lance’s. He’ll pass out any minute now. Lance will live, though.

Lance will live, so there’s happy ending in this, after all.

He’s stupid and selfish and all the things he’d been trying not to be, but he pulls Lance against him anyway, the glass of their helmets bumping together. He doesn’t want to look at the black of space as he dies. He wants to see that inexplicable blue.

He shouldn’t touch Lance, not in the way he’s finally allowing himself to want to, in these final painful breaths, but he allows himself the luxury anyway of dropping his head into the crux of Lance’s shoulder, breathing through the layers of blood and sweat to get to the real scent of Lance, whatever that may be.

“I’m sorry. For the things I said.”

“Don’t. We’re not doing this now.”

“But—“

“Shut your quiznak.”

Keith lifts his head, faces Lance head on again, and leans forward so it slips back into fine focus. He opens his mouth to make a retort, but his body is too heavy for anything above a whisper. He wants to say what an idiot he is. He wants to take back every single insult he’s ever laid into Lance. He wants to maybe tell all the things Lance really is, and then some.

Instead, he focuses on the precise shape of Lance’s face. Instead he says:

“Tell me about the first time you flew. Like, _really_ flew.”

Lance huffs, like he’s annoyed, but maybe it’s to clear the roughness out of his throat. “Once I started, you couldn’t get me to stop. The senior officers nearly had to threaten to shoot me out of the sky. It was just a simple one-person jet. I’d just been promoted from cargo pilot to fighter class. It was the best day of my life, and I nearly made myself sick with how fast and hard I flew. I flew until the tank was empty and when I touched down I got landed with cleaning the bathrooms for a week for disobeying orders. I’ll never forget what the senior officer said after I got out of that cock pit.”

“’You’re fucking crazy’?” Keith’s eyes droop closed for a second before snapping open. He doesn’t dare lose sight of that blue.

“Close.” Pink lips twitch into the bastard child of a smile, abandoned before it’s even grown. “He said, ‘Nice showing off, Cadet. But you could fly the rest of your life, and you’d never be as good as Kogane.’”

“You’re worth more than ten of me.” His words are slurring, like he’s drunk.

“No.” If he weren’t half blind, Keith would swear there was something glistening in Lance’s eyes, the corners of those pink lips turning downwards. “No, I don’t think I am.”

It happens in stop motion freeze frame, the jump cut progression of Lance’s sad frowning to Lance’s angry glaring to Lance’s muttered, “Yeah, _no_ ,” before reaching forward and unbuckling the strap on Keith’s helmet, before his own.

Panic shoots through Keith’s veins like ice as he realizes what Lance is going to do. In his weakened state he’s still got pilot’s instincts, and he grabs Lance’s wrist and yanks it away, too exhausted to speak. He does his best to convey the fierce _fuck off_ with a glare, but he’s pretty sure his finer motor functions might not be listening to his starving brain anymore.

He kicks back at Lance, hopes that if he can hit Lance’s laser wound that Lance will be distracted enough that he’ll leave Keith to die in peace so he can tend to his own wounds, but Lance appears to have other ideas. Lance brings their foreheads together, feverish skin to feverish skin. Keith thinks, stupid and selfish all over again, he just wanted to hold me. Before I go. Before this—

Lance presses his forehead to Keith’s, so close their noses brush. If there were oxygen to breathe, Keith would sigh. He leans into the touch, holds his breath for as long as he can.

“Tell Hunk and Pidge I’m sorry,” Lance whispers, the warmth of his skin the only thing in the entire universe that matters. “And Shiro… Shiro will understand.”

Several things come together for Keith, bit by bit and then all at once, and by the time he’s figured them all out it’s too late. He makes to push away from Lance again but Lance has already removed his helmet and begun shoving it onto Keith’s head. His hands scrabble for purchase in a last ditch effort, playing dirty, trying to smack Lance away, punch his wound, beat him back, anything, but Lance is too quick, and Keith is too weak to be quicker.

The air that pushes into his lungs is stale and smells odd but Keith swallows it down, starving. Even with his mind screaming to help Lance—who isn’t even wearing his helmet anymore, putting on Keith’s broken one instead—Keith’s own body betrays him; it’s goddamn survival instinct too strong for even him to override.

“Bye Keith,” Lance says with a rueful smile, as if everything’s going to be all right, even though nothing is. “Give ‘em hell for me.”

Keith rips the helmet off, damn them both they can _both_ suffocate to death for all he cares, when Lance’s hands band around his chest and maneuver him. It seems to be an attempt at an awkward embrace, until Lance’s forearm and elbow wrap tightly around Keith’s neck, cutting off whatever air he’d had left to breathe. The panic turns into rage, righteous and furious rage but Lance forces him back against his chest, putting his weight into it, out of Keith’s reach, even as Keith’s hands frantically scramble and scratch at his arm, trying to bat him away. His feet kick and slide against the metal floor, trying to get traction.

Black spots bursting like fireworks in his eyes, wet soundless noises squelching in his throat. Blood smears on his fingertips as he tries to free himself. All the while can feel Lance’s heartbeat rabbiting through his t-shirt, the frantic whispers of, “Sorry, sorry, fuck, I’m so sorry” in his ear.

If it were anyone else, Keith would figure he’d be dead in a minute. But he knows, as soon as he gives in to the beckoning unconsciousness, exactly what’s going to happen. He’s only been watching Lance’s stupid goddamned martyr complex play itself out for months now.

He knows exactly how this story ends.

The chokehold doesn’t loosen, even when Keith finally passes out. The apologies in his ear and the image of dark blue, unchangeable and earnest and beautiful, follow him all the way into the dark.

\--

On the hard nights, on the long nights, on nights spent in the desert filled with stars, in the barracks filled with pilots, in the homes filled with other people’s children, Keith stared up, eyes open, and spun out fantasies in storybook format.

As a child, he’d strove to be the prince. Traveling from place to place. Searching for a new home. He made sure to be the one to take off first: from foster homes, from the Garrison, from the fucking planet itself.

In childhood dreams, he was the prince.

But he has always been the fox. And someone always has to leave.

\--

It doesn’t feel like a dream. At least, not at first.

Most of Keith’s dreams, come in flickers and fragments. He dreams like he flies, fast and reckless, without much thought put into the task. Even sleeping, he does not linger.

But this is a heavier kind sleep than he’s used to, one where a darkness that clouds in and keeps him from waking, even as he becomes aware of dreaming. That bone deep weariness ferments inside him, turning him sluggish, groggy. After years of beating it off, Keith is helpless to let it take over.

He takes off running running running, because it’s all he’s ever been good for anyhow, but the dream snatches onto his heels like quick sand.

So he dreams in Technicolor, three-dimensional immersion so vivid it hurts the backs of his eyes but there’s no waking from it. There is just him.

He is four. It is raining. He’s curled up underneath a stoop after running away for first time. Body trembling. Wracked with chills. When he pulls a beaten up red and white jacket from a Goodwill donation bin, it’s a thousand pounds heavy in his numb hands. The cops pick him up a few blocks after that and take him home. The jacket is huge, but it’s his. And therefore it is the most important object in the universe.

He rips off the jacket rips off his own skin and runs from it.

The sky is black and the stars are pale yellow and he is six when he sees the night sky through a telescope lens at Space Camp, a bigger something than he’s ever seen. They tell him that space is uncharted. That scientists are looking for pilots to go up into it. It is the first time in his life that he cannot sleep all night.

He rips those bright stars from his eyes and he runs away from those, too.

He is eight and skinny, and the bigger kids like to steal his lunch money. A woman with a clipboard and a kind smile asks him to tell her how he’s feeling using a big box of crayons and construction paper. He thinks about Ginger the cat, snarling and feral, so he draws that, careful to put blood on her outstretched claws and sharp teeth in her angry mouth.

Everything inside him feels loud and so he runs quiet, slipping from one life into the next, one year to another, wondering which chapter of this story it is where the boy comes along to tame the animal in him. If there’s a boy in this story at all.

He is twelve and still skinny, but he discovers that he’s smaller and infinitely faster than the other boys in his class. He pickpockets back his lunch money and comes away with a split lip and a suspension and it completely fucking is worth it.

Runs faster, doesn’t trip, wipes that oozing mouth on the back of his back of his hand. A wild, lonely, and untrusting thing. Let the wild fucking rumpus start.

He runs so fast other people can’t keep up with him, runs circles around everyone and so when he is fifteen a recruitment officer sees his record sprints on the dingy public school track and asks him if he’d like to join the army.

He outruns them too. Not even buzz cuts and drill sergeant discipline can slow him down. He is wild. He is rootless. He will outrun them all and never look back. Run. Run. Claw. Tear. Scratch. Run. Wipe the blood on the sleeve of his jacket. Run some more.

He’ll never be tamed. Never be had. Never be anyone’s responsibility but his own.

He runs until he’s lost them, lost himself. Sixteen years old and grasping at hope like a rabbit from thin air, an elusive and stupid magic trick. His hands are dry, his mouth is drier. The desert days are scorching hot, and the nights are bitter cold. His hair grows out and his jacket fits better. He is wholly himself and no one else’s, but that is not always a good thing.

There is not much else to run from, but that doesn’t stop him from going anyhow. Just a few chapters left.

He is seventeen, and he leaves Earth behind and never looks back, so he runs faster.

He is seventeen, and there is a boy who makes him slow down, so he runs harder.

He is seventeen and he is a Paladin. He is a blade. He is nobody’s to tame. He is all angles and sharp edges but that is the unfortunate truth about hard, brittle things.

They break.

\--

The healing pod opens and when the air of the outside world comes rushing at Keith he feels shaky, and vulnerable, and soft. Firm hands catch him before he slams face first into the ground.

“Give him some breathing room.” Shiro. Keith’s vision uncrosses itself and focuses in on all their faces, swimming in his vision. The room’s spinning a bit but he’s still breathing, still alive.

“Lance.” The name falls from his lips on the first breath he takes.

“Keith, maybe you should—“

“Where is he?”

“You had a concussion, maybe—“

“Is he alright?”

“We can get you something to eat…”

“Is he even alive?” His voice feels so hoarse, like he’d been screaming. He wrenches out of where Hunk’s supporting his weight and his knees buckle. He waits for the hard unforgiving floor, but it’s Allura that steps to his side, her grip like iron on his arm.

“Take it easy.” She says, “Lance is alive. Keith, listen to me. He’s alright. See for yourself.”

She leads him, because he’s helpless but to stagger weakly, over to the healing pod Lance has been in. Through the turquoise chamber it’s difficult to glean whether Allura’s telling the truth or not, but Keith can see the bandage on his arm, the shadows under his eyes. Alright, but not out of the woods yet. There’s nothing Keith can do to help him now, but he presses his palm to the glass anyway, takes in a shaking breath as he leans all his weight against it.

He remembers everything, there’s no memory recollection needed. He remembers the blood, the thinning air, the blacking out, all the things they’d said.

“I,” Keith breathes, “am going to _kill_ him.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” Allura says. “You’re going to rest some more. You may be healed, but that doesn’t mean you’re ready for murder just yet. C’mon.” She offers him an arm and leans in conspiratorially. “Let’s get you something to eat.”

Minutes later, Keith is sitting in a chair eating food that he’s not really tasting, staring at the healing pod and Lance’s closed eyes while Coran walks him through the recap of everything that happened after he’d blacked out.

“We don’t know how long he’d been without oxygen, if there was any lasting brain damage,” Coran explains. “About another day in the healing pod should do it, but even then we’ll need to keep a close watch on him.”

Keith nods robotically, hardly listening.

“We were worried about you,” Allura adds, “but I’m glad the both of you are okay. Once Lance wakes, everything will be alright, don’t you worry.”

The tone sounds so hopeful, smile so sweetly optimistic that Keith glances away from Lance to look at her. It’s an odd dynamic, the princess who had everything and lost it, and the orphan who never had much to begin with. Keith is well aware he’s got a pretty sob story, but it occurs to him that Princess Allura, princess of Altea, of a dead culture and a non-existent planet, may know a thing or two about pain.

He thinks about how badly she wants to maintain the things she’s lost, and realizes that she loses them every day she wakes. Allura has lost everything, and still has the will to get up every day and face the ugly truth of her world with hope.

If he lost one of the few things in this life he cared about, Keith doesn’t know that he’d have strength at all to keep going. It already felt so lonely, this life.

Despite the empty stomach, eating only serves to make him feel queasy, like he’d swallowed stones instead of food. He doesn’t want to stick around and wait for Lance to wake up. There is only so much hopelessness he can put up with, and apparently waiting around to see if Lance is okay or not has hit his cap on it.

Hours stretch into days and a severe case of cabin fever comes with it. The panic creeps up and up on him in a slow measured way. He’s worried sick for Lance but worrying never did anyone any good so he does anything to keep himself busy. Fully healed now, except for the slightest tenderness around his throat, he runs drills and he spars, sinks his knife into targets from an increasing distance away. The sensation keeping him on full power isn’t adrenaline. It’s fumes. It’s helplessness. It’s the cautious and errant notion that a boy with a wicked smile will open his eyes any day now.

He thinks about how he can’t sleep, how he feels like he hasn’t slept since the day he was born, weightless and struggling to grasp something that feels more grounding than this life. He thinks about food, and oxygen, and sacrifice, and all the little ways a person can break themselves into pieces just so there’s more of life for everyone else snatch up.

He thinks about how years of flight school and combat training did nothing to prepare him for what happens when the world feels tilted off it’s access just because one of its occupants stopped breathing for a few minutes.

A year ago he wouldn’t have been able to pick Lance’s face out of a crowd. Now it feels like he’s the only one Keith cares to see again.

This does nothing to erase the fact that he is so goddamn furious with Lance, Jesus fucking Christ. But the more sleepless nights he sits with that anger the more he recognizes the true shape and form of it, the trembling fear of something he’d almost lost, even though it had never been his to begin with.

How naïve, how foolish, how wanting he had been.

Keith is pointedly not there when Lance wakes up, mostly because he doesn’t want to be, but partly because he’s up to his elbows in grease and shield finish and all the stupid spring cleaning tasks he could think of to execute on his lion. He works until his shoulders burn with it, until his hands begin to blister and sting, letting the fury strip off of him in waves, fetter out into the helplessness, pinging off the walls inside the cavern in him that had felt so naively full for just a few moments.

When the door to the garage opens, he’s expecting to hear Shiro’s or Allura’s tones, or even Pidge’s chirp as she ribs him for avoiding the whole situation. He’s more surprised than ever when it’s Hunk that ambles over to him, tired and drawn but still undeniably solid in his comforting Hunk sort of way.

Unlike all the people he’d expecting, Hunk doesn’t look angry or disappointed. He just looks quietly at Keith work in a way that suggests nothing, and somehow makes Keith feel infinitely guiltier for it.

Keith doesn’t raise his eyes from where he’s waxing off a scratch. “You wanted something?”

Hunk tilts his head, expression still unfathomable. “Lance is awake. He’s asking about you.”

Keith makes a slow and deliberate circle over the scratch, grips the cloth tightly. “Is he alright?”

“We were worried at first that he’d lost some of his brain function because he didn’t immediately hit on someone as soon as he opened his eyes,” Hunk says ruefully, “But that may have something to do with the fact that he’s just panicked that you might never speak to him again. But that’s just a working theory.”

“Is that right,” Keith says doubtfully, grinding his teeth. Lance was panicked? About time he got a taste of his own goddamn medicine. It’s vicious enough sounding that Hunk could—and probably should—call him out for it, but Hunk doesn’t. He waits for the outburst, the loss of patience, the _I don’t understand you_ , but it never comes. This particular and patient silence feels unbearable.

“You know, when we found the two of you, we weren’t sure how much time had passed from when you lost oxygen. We didn’t even realize what had even happened until we saw his blue helmet on your red suit. He had your helmet on too, but he wasn’t breathing, or if he was it wasn’t enough to really keep him alive much longer. All we really knew was that his mask was keeping you alive.”

Keith doesn’t move. Keith doesn’t breathe. He grips the rag so tight his fingers cramp and shake.

“Lance was… I dunno how else to describe it. He was curled around you. You were unconscious and he was ready to die, but he didn’t try to die without making sure you were safe. He wouldn’t let go of your hand. Practically had to pry him off so we could get you both to healing pods. You were responding, he wasn’t.”

“If you’re trying to hint that I shouldn’t be mad at him, you’re out of your mind.”

“I never said his methods were orthodox, but you should try to—”

“What,” Keith spits, “thank him? Forget it.”

“He was saving your life.”

“Yeah, by giving up his own in the process. I never asked him to do that!”

“So what, there’s no problem in dying for your teammates, but one of them tries to die for you and suddenly you’re all up in arms about it? How’s that fair to Lance?”

“I didn’t ask him to save me.” Keith could go on and on like a broken record. “I was _ready_ to die.”

In a rather uncharacteristic fashion, Hunk rolls his eyes. “This may come as a shock to you Keith, but so are the rest of us. We’re all ready to die. All of us, at any second. Wouldn’t stayed behind on this crazy ass mission if we weren’t.”

That trips Keith up more than he cares to admit. He scowls. “It’s different,” he says stubbornly.

“How?”

How indeed. It’s different because they’re younger, because they’re good, and they’re selfless. Death is not an option for Pidge and her tiny wrists; bones light like a bird’s, or Shiro—the Champion, with that gentler smile that he saves only for Allura. Death is not an option for any of his friends, but most specifically one. He tries his goddamn hardest not to think of Lance but it’s proving to be an impossible task.

Anger slips out of him in increments the more he thinks of them all, dull exhaustion at the end of the tunnel. Behind Hunk, out the portside window of the castle, the stars burn burn burn.

“You have families. You have somewhere you belong. Somewhere you call home. If you die, someone will miss you when you’re gone.”

And that’s that, the bitter and miserable truth of why he was the best pilot, the best soldier, the best at taking whatever shit life threw at him and coming up swinging. When you’ve got no one to write home to, you’ve got nothing at risk. He could get the job done without any casualties in the wake of his disappearance. The army probably breathed a sigh of relief the day he neglected to leave a ‘next of kin’ address for condolences.

Hunk opens his mouth and then closes it, shaking his head. “You’re a good guy, Keith, so forgive me for saying this but—for the best pilot in the Garrison, you sure are dense.”

Heroes die. Maybe that explains the reason he’s still alive.

Hunk pushes through the silence, talking in that same earnest tone that you could never misinterpret for bullshit, even if you tried. “You keep saying that you’re ready to die, and I get that, I do. But have you considered that Lance _isn’t_ quite ready for you to die, and that’s why he switched the helmets in the first place?”

Lance, who’d practically starved himself just so everyone else could starve a little less. Lance, who dove in front of Keith in what appeared to be a show off maneuver, and took the brunt of Keith’s wrath rather than admit the truth. Lance, who’d rather be tortured for hours himself than let anyone else face the same treatment. Lance, who’d bitched and moaned about glory and parades in his honor but didn’t even hesitate when it came between choosing Keith’s survival over his own.

He’d done all of that, despite Keith mocking him, despite Keith calling him useless, accusing him of contributing ‘jack shit’ to the team. Despite Keith telling him he’d never be good enough. Despite Keith throwing every single attempt at kindness back in his face. Lance had done all of it despite that.

Or, perhaps, because of it.

The dawning horror that cyclones in his belly, dredging up the guilt that he’d forced to lie dormant this entire time, nearly knocks him flat. He should have known. There was no challenge that Lance ever backed down from, no greater pleasure that he took than proving Keith wrong. Lance had been prepared to die thinking that Keith thought him useless. Lance had been prepared to die in place of Keith, as if that were a fair trade.

Keith doesn’t really know what to say to that.

He has seen the ripple effect of loss in its many forms. Kids who’d lost parents, princesses who’d lost planets. He’d seen it, sure, but he’d never known anything beyond his own experience of having nothing right from the very start. It wasn’t until he had something, had Lance, that he knew the fear of almost losing him, that he’d remembered why he’d wanted to be alone in the first place. But in pushing Lance away, he’d only made it worse.

There’s no trying to articulate to Hunk the colossal tailspin of _what the fuck_ that’s come crashing down on him these past few weeks. How he hadn’t been there when Lance woke up because it would mean having to face everything else that came with it—the fear, the yearning, the subtle undoing that came from one crooked smile.

“I can’t lose him,” Keith blurts, realization breaking over him like the dawn.

“You haven’t. He’s alive, and he’s not going anywhere. As long as you don’t let him.”

“I mean—“

“I know what you meant. But you’re not the only one with a boatload of insecurity issues. Quit running, dude. And quit beating him off with a stick. Doesn’t always have to be bickering and barbs.”

“You want me to tell him how I feel.”

“I want you to stop brooding and I want my best friend to stop trying to kill himself so you’ll notice him.”

Keith frowns. “This seems unnecessarily complicated.”

“Yeah well, no one ever said you two had it easy,” Hunk supplies. He rises from the bench he’s seated on, walks out into the hallway. “But for what it’s worth, I think you’re just stubborn enough to make it work in the end.”

One of the blisters on Keith’s hands shines as he examines it.

He looks up. “You’re a good friend, Hunk.”

Hunk dips his head in a nod. “Undoubtedly the best. But I only uphold that reputation if you take my advice.”

By the time Keith means to ask exactly which advice Hunk is referring to, the door is already closed.

 

\--

Dragging his feet to get around to talking to Lance isn’t exactly what Keith does, but it’s pretty close to it. He hides in the hangar, fixes as many things on Red and buffs out as many scratches as he can, but the telltale silence of his teammates and the fact that he hasn’t been bothered once means that Keith has been left alone for the sole purpose of sorting out his feelings.

The more he thinks it over, tries and denies Hunk’s words, the more those words eat at him. The more his carefully crafted façade begins to quietly fall apart.

He tries not to think of how hurt Lance will be for Keith avoiding him, for not even thanking him. It probably won’t be much of a mending anyways. His and Lance’s relationship, whatever it was, consisted of nothing but papercuts with a temporary balm of honey. The only times Keith could talk to Lance like a normal human being were if one or both of them was on the verge of dying and gee wasn’t that healthy.

Keith has fucked things up too much to not tell Lance how he feels. It’s the only way to counteract all the shit he did to fuck things up in the first place. Even if Lance laughs him out of the room, even if Lance is disgusted and never wants to speak to him again, he has to know. He has to know that at the very least, Keith doesn’t think he’s a waste of space. Keith has to be honest, even if it hurts. Better him hurting than Lance.

Even sulking in the hangar gets to be tiresome, because Keith can’t exactly speak robot lion but he’s pretty sure Red is fixing him with a judgmental gaze that burns a hole in the back of Keith’s head every time he turns. So he finally gives up and heads to his room, where solitary confinement and avoidance of his problems will finally, blessedly be possible.

All his instincts for survival couldn’t have prepared Keith for this. Even the mere thought of sitting down and saying ‘Lance, I’m sorry’ or ‘Lance, I care about you’ or ‘Lance can we just speak like normal people who aren’t always at each other’s throats’ makes him want to put his head through a wall.

“You’re an asshole, Kogane,” he mutters to himself, sauntering down the hallway. “You are a _fucking_ asshole.”

He opens the door, pushing away an impending headache and hoping for something a little better than a few scant hours of sleep when he stops, wide eyed.

The lights are on.

Someone is sitting on his bed.

“So, I’ve been doing some thinking.”

Telltale smudges of exhaustion hang beneath his eyes alongside a pallid complexion that suggests he likely snuck out of the infirmary without permission to come here. Something about the way he shifts on the mattress, like he can’t get comfortable, suggests that if Keith were to touch him his skin would blossom black and blue.

But despite all that, or maybe _because_ of all that, Lance acts as if this is any ordinary day, flipping through some book or another, like he’s been there for hours, waiting patiently for Keith to walk in as if there were all the time in the world.

Keith considers for the briefest second that he’s still sleeping in the healing pod, but even after rubbing his eyes and blinking and trying to remember if this is a dream or not because _Lance is sitting on Keith’s bed_ , he’s still there.

This is not a dream. This is reality, where Lance McClain wouldn’t stop talking if his life depended on it. Reality where Lance has dark circles under his eyes and is so worn-looking he’d shatter if you touched him too hard. Reality where Lance should probably still be resting but probably snuck up to crawl _here_ into Keith’s _bed_ where he’s now talking to Keith as if he wasn’t all but dead just a few days ago.

“This might seem out of the blue, but I’ll just cut to the chase so there’s no confusion about this. I’m not sure how Shiro will take this whole thing with you and me,” Lance prattles on, “But I know for sure Allura is going to want us to keep it professional, so I’m thinking as long as we go to sleep in separate rooms, and then _you_ sneak into my room once everyone’s asleep, we can probably get away with this while being low key. And we can bicker a whole bunch in public if that puts you at ease. It won’t be easy, because hey, it’s us, but I figure it can’t be harder than pulling a Sandra Bullock in Gravity and floating around helplessly in space until help came, so—”

“What the _fuck_ ,” Keith interrupts, “are you doing here.”

More importantly, what the fuck is he talking about, but Keith doesn’t have the emotional breadth to address that yet.

He wants to be mad, oh how Keith wishes he could work up the energy to rip Lance a new asshole, because Lance looks completely healed, but it only serves to remind Keith of how he’d looked the last time he saw him. Of all the blood.

He wants to be mad, but Lance—fucking _Lance_ —is sitting on his bed with all the nonchalance of someone who’s not only seen the bed before but also slept in it, jumped on it, and done all the myriad of things synonymous with comfort on that bed.

Lance is just sitting there, banged up and idiotic and _whole_. So yeah, Keith wants to be mad, but at the same time, Keith’s not sure he’s going to have any room for that emotion at all. His chest feels like an overstuffed teddy bear all at once, bursting at the seams with fluff.

“Oh,” Lance says slowly, faltering. “Well, I figured you’d want to set up a system before everything gets complicated and everyone starts asking questions.”

Keith stares at Lance. He’s either going deaf or is still under oxygenated because _what_.

“A system.”

“Yes, I think so.”

Silence.

Lance starts to look a bit nervous, fingers twisting at the corner of the bed sheet. “Or,” he says, swallowing, “maybe I misinterpreted this. Us. If there was even an us to begin with, I—. Look, this wouldn’t exactly be the first time I absolutely missed the mark on a person’s feelings for me, so maybe I should just go. And uh, we can forget this ever happened, and uh, probably forget the stuff that I said or did when I thought I was going to die…”

He trails off, uncertain, freight train conversation tactics now running out of steam. This is the moment, probably, when Keith should say something. Say it’s _not_ in Lance’s head, that he _didn’t_ miss the mark, and that Keith wanted to pretty much forget everything except what Lance has ever said or done.

It clicks into place, then. Lance was never going to laugh Keith out of the room. Lance is sitting here, waiting to be laughed out of the room himself.

Keith should say something. Keith needs to say something.

Keith, at the most _convenient time possible_ , appears to be going into shock. Lance is crumpling by the second and Keith can’t seem to get around the black hole that’s opened up in his chest, sucking up all the things he’s been dying to tell Lance since the second he woke up.

“Before I go, can I just say I’m sorry?” Lance says, and Keith can’t deal with that right now. He doesn’t want to see sad Lance because that means Lance is not that good of a liar after all. “I’m sorry that I read things wrong and for the thing I said when I did, I’m sorry for putting you in a chokehold and I’m sorry for—”

“Shut up.” The expression bursts out of Keith like a bullet, and godfucking _dammit_ it’s pretty much the last thing he wants to say to Lance but apparently the only thing he can. There’s no asking Lance to understand what he can’t seem to even speak. He just knows that he’s got to get Lance to stop talking.

Lance winces. “I know. I deserve that, but I just want to—”

“Shut _up.”_ He steps towards the bed. It’s either barrel forward or do nothing, because there’s simply nowhere left to run.

“No, listen to me.” Lance scoots closer to the edge of the bed. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I was trying to _save_ you.”

He looks braced for impact, misery written along his mouth and apology in the bend of his spine as he sits. Like he’s just waiting for Keith to yell at him, like he thinks he deserves it. He doesn’t get it. Of course he doesn’t. How could he, when Keith’s doing nothing but advancing like a hunter stalks his pray and telling him to be quiet?

Keith, all instinct, no plan.

Keith, heart slamming against his ribs, trying to crash land after an entire lifetime of flight.

For all his finesse and acute pilot’s instincts, he really is doing a terrible job; this much is clear at the sight Lance’s furrowed brow, lips parted in protest as he tries to be whatever Keith wants him to. It makes Keith ache, which makes Keith angry, which makes Keith of course lash out at probably the only person in the entire span of galaxies that makes him feel so insane.

“I told you to _shut up,_ Lance.”

“But I—”

Keith makes a small, frustrated noise in the back of his throat, shutting off all other instincts with a resolute _fuck it_ , and kisses him.

Like all things Keith does, it lands more like a punch to the gut rather than a press of lips, too hard and too fast, and over before it’s even begun.

It seems to do the trick.

“Oh.” Lance’s eyes are comically wide.

“You all caught up now?”

“Um. What?”

Resisting the tremendous urge to roll his eyes, while also simultaneously trying not to throw up from the anxiety of it all, Keith doesn’t move. There’s no running away now.

He closes his eyes. He breathes. And when he opens them, Lance is still there.

The wild thundering of his heart begins to slow.

Careful not to move too suddenly, as if the very air around them could jostle and break, Keith kneels on the mattress, and crowds forward into the space between Lance’s sprawled legs. He balances on his palms, one on either side of Lance’s thighs and leans in. Leans even when he hears Lance’s sharp intake of breath, or maybe it’s his own. Leans until they’re nose to nose, and Keith’s faced with the undeniable sight of Lance’s freckles, the almost sleepy expression on his face, slack with surprise, unable to breathe.

He kisses Lance soft, doesn’t move and doesn’t touch save for where their lips meet and their noses bump. Feels heat in his face and knows that color must be flooding his cheeks.

He kisses Lance soft, but then he thinks about the eventual need to come up for air that brings the last time they’d been this close bubbling up to the surface, and then he kisses Lance not so soft at all.

“You piss me off so goddamn much.” Keith seals the declaration onto Lance’s mouth, once, twice, a hundred times. Lance smells like that same pungent soap that all of them use in the shower. The corner of his lips are slowly pulling into that stupid smirk and Keith for the life of him can’t help it—he kisses that, too.

Thinking straight isn’t an option for Keith beyond getting a fistful of that messy hair and kissing that messy boy for all he’s worth, so he does just that, furious and fearful, like he’s braced for a fight.

Lance’s hands are curled into fists in the material of his own jeans, and he’s still not moving, like he isn’t quite sure what to do with them. But when Keith pulls back, there’s this stupidly glazed look on Lance’s face, grin stretching wider in an expression so reverent that Keith almost wonders what Lance could possibly be looking at. When he realizes, it’s with a warm ache in his belly.

“Kiss me back, idiot,” Keith breathes. “Or are you gonna make me do all the work?”

The smile brightens so much that Keith feels blinded by it. There are dimples, and laugh lines, a rush of pink in the apples of his cheeks. They pull him in like gravity and he leans in, hovering just inches away.

“Sorry. Sorry,” Lance mutters, biting his bottom lip as if that’ll keep the smile tampered down. ”I’ll get right on that.”

That said, Lance finally moves, settles one hand on Keith’s waist to steady him, and uses the other to tuck a finger under his chin. To his credit, Lance gives as good as he gets, guiding Keith towards him until they collide once more. His mouth is warm and soft and he is every bit as gentle as Keith could have hoped he would be, tentative and unsure and so achingly tender in the way he touches. Keith’s spent his whole life warding everyone off with fists up but now, as Lance’s hand makes the trek from his chin to fit along his jaw, then around the back of his neck to curl in the hair at the nape of Keith’s neck, he feels the armor around his chest start to crack like melting permafrost and come down, piece by frigid piece.

The same fear and wonderment that had been beating against his rib cage just days ago now bursts forth, the sensation hitting him like that very first flight, rush of gravity and speed and sound knocking him off his damn feet. He leans into the sensation, into Lance, too dizzy to worry if it seems like he’s starving for that contact, because he likely is.

They fall backwards onto the pillows, tussling a bit because they’re not them if there’s not just a hint of competition, of playing to win. On a normal day Lance may have the upper hand, but he’s probably got half the energy and seems to have no problem letting Keith take control of the kiss, pressing his palms down against the mattress. Keith greedily takes every opening and advantage he can of the situation, feels a swoop of elation and annoyance when Lance starts laughing, because Keith is the one making him laugh. He’s straddling Lance and Lance is grabbing at Keith with all lack of grace and finesse that a seventeen year old would be expected to have and it is perfect. Lance’s laughter keeps breaking up their kisses into toothy grins and still it is perfect.

“Are you always this in a hurry?” Lance laughs. “You got somewhere to be?”

Or maybe not so perfect.

“Did I do something wrong?” Keith blurts, suddenly reeling with the notion that he might be kissing with an urgency and intent that Lance doesn’t like, that he’s somehow managed to fuck this up before it’s hardly even started. He sits up, and starts scrambling away from Lance, suddenly all too aware of where his shirt has rucked up along his waist. “Sorry, I—”

Lance sits up too, grabs his shirt by the collar, keeping Keith in place. “While I’m usually all for you admitting you’re wrong in every day situations, it pains me to say that you’ve done nothing wrong. You actually—,” Lance cuts off, lips parting as he looks at Keith, _really_ looks at him. “Jesus. I mean, look at you. I don’t think there’s anything you can do to me at this point that I’d consider _wrong_ per say.”

Keith flushes, bites his lip as he looks down. “Then—”

“Like this.” The timbre of Lance’s tenor is lower than Keith’s ever heard it, almost hoarse. He reaches out a hand to cup Keith’s cheek, swipe his thumb along the shape of his cheekbone. “I like it like this.”

The sound of his voice holds Keith still, so very still, as Lance leans into him and shows him exactly what ‘this’ is, tipping Keith’s chin up once more and gently pressing his mouth to the vulnerable skin on the underside of Keith’s jaw.

Now it’s Keith’s turn to be stunned into wordlessness, pulse rushing faster, at odds with the glacial pace of their movements. “Oh.”

He feels Lance smile against his skin, humming in a way that can only be described as pleased, or in Lance’s case, smug. He doesn’t respond with a verbal retort, rather just presses another kiss, a little higher, behind Keith’s ear. A full body shudder rattles through Keith when Lance bites and tugs oh-so-slightly at his earlobe, the sensation turning his bones into what feels like edible goop.

If Lance is made victorious by the embarrassing way Keith appears to be melting, he doesn’t take time to comment on it, rather just maneuvers Keith to be pliant in his arms with coaxing kisses along his jaw, his neck, his face. For as simple as the action is, it feels revelatory, makes Keith warm and wanting and curious. He’s faced once more with the disparity of Lance in concept versus Lance in execution, that for all Lance’s talk about romantic conquests, he’s a lot softer at this than he makes himself out to be. He likes it like this.

Keith sets his jaw as Lance peppers kisses over him, determined. He wants to do this right. He is a hard and sharp edged thing but Lance deserves something a little more malleable and mellow. No one deserves it more than him.

He’s got his knees firmly planted on either side of Lance’s thighs and his arms wound around Lance’s neck like a lifeline and takes full advantage of that fact. Before Lance can swoop in again, Keith ducks one of his own slow open mouthed kisses against the column of Lance’s throat, taking hot and possessive pleasure in the hitching gasp that Lance makes in his ear, in the way his fingers scrabble for purchase and grip tighter on his hips.

With this gesture comes the sudden desperate need to put his mouth everywhere at once on Lance: leave marks, make it his, because he’s so goddamn scared of losing it. But he forces that frantic urge down, quells the fear in it, and takes all the time in the world. Instead of every inch at once, he kisses one by one, taking his time, drawing out whatever shallow breaths he can so he can commit them to memory. Always a quick study, Keith discovers a new curiosity satisfied with the realization that the sweeter and more lingering he is, the more Lance seems to respond, quaking and turning into Keith’s attentions like a bloom towards sunlight, seeking out Keith’s lips with his own. But Keith isn’t quite ready to let him have them, not yet.

“Like that?” he whispers, dragging his mouth across the smattering of freckles along Lance’s cheekbones, kissing just beneath those long closed lashes.

When Lance doesn’t respond—just screws his eyes shut and grips tighter at Keith’s hips, tight enough to bruise—Keith brings his attentions slightly lower, experimentally darts his tongue out and sucks a bit on the jut of Lance’s sharp collarbone.

Strong hands suddenly grip Keith’s hair and yank him back so they’re face to face once more. Pupils blown, eyes half open and bright, almost wild, that’s the picture of Lance. His mouth is wet and bitten, even though Keith hasn’t really paid him attention there.

“Yeah,” Lance says in a dazed voice, visibly gulping. “Something like that.”

He looks wrecked in a devastatingly beautiful sort of way, which likely means it’s Keith’s turn to feel smug about his effect but Keith can’t. His brain is short circuiting and his blood rushing and he’s helpless to resist the delicious and heady pull of his own body, lets Lance yank him back in once more for a searing open mouthed kiss. Too enthusiastic for his own good, Lance unbalances them both and they topple over, Keith still straddling and now hovering over him.

Having picked up enough from his quick trek of kisses, Keith continues in that vein, letting Lance lick into his mouth in a measured pace. The taste of him is intoxicating, and it’s all too easy to respond in kind, swiping his tongue over Lance’s bottom lip, sucking it into his own mouth in a way that elicits a cut off groan from Lance.

In the most clichéd way possible, Keith could quite literally do this all day and not get bored: those nimble fingers twisted and tangled in his hair, kissing that crooked smile open, the warmth and the light of Lance open to him and only him. He doesn’t know what the fuck he even did to deserve it, but he doesn’t dare question it. Only kisses with eyes closed and wonders if Lance can feel his heart beating through his shirt.

It could be hours, how long they go at it like that, or maybe days, or eons. Time feels rootless and without structure in space as a general rule, but time spent kissing Lance feels infinite, without limits of passing or slowing down, just a general continuous stream of warmth that seeps into Keith with the promise of never leaving.

How does one tame a wild thing?

Lance’s hands wander again; settle on the small of his back to pull him down so their chests are flush—thundering heartbeat to heartbeat. Their eyes lock, everything laid bare between them.

How does one tame a wild thing?

Keith doesn’t quite know the answer to that one yet. But when Lance nuzzles at his jaw, less of a kiss and more just a drag of his open mouth, a few short breaths against his hot skin, entwines their hands together against the pillow, Keith thinks he might be on to something.

He pulls back a few inches, knows he’s grinning like an idiot, and for the first time, really doesn’t care that Lance sees. Wants him to see it, even. He’s hard in his jeans and so is Lance, but the urge to address that matter doesn’t feel as hurried as Keith would’ve expected.

“For the record,” Keith says, “I’m sorry too. For a lot of stuff. But first and foremost I’m sorry for not doing this before.”

“Before— _wait_.“ Lance gapes, eyes comically wide. “How long have you wanted to?”

Keith props his chin on Lance’s chest. “I mean, I wasn’t aware of it until you went and got yourself tortured, really.”

“Yeah, because nothing’s more attractive to you then me in pain.”

“And you?” Keith almost feels foolish and weirdly young for asking, like those kids who send notes to their crushes that say ‘do you like me? check yes or no.’

“Probably from the first time I saw you fly the simulator at the Garrison,” Lance blurts, another flush spilling over his face. “Maybe even before that.”

Keith really doesn’t know what to say to that, only aware of the hopeful balloon swelling in his chest, and the warmth filling out all the empty parts of him.

“So wait, all your yelling and snappy bullshit? That was you making advances?” Lance slaps a hand over his forehead. “Should’ve known.”

“You really aren’t the most observant, are you?”

“I feel like I should at least be commended for figuring out enough to bring me here.” Lance raises an eyebrow suggestively, another coy smirk dancing across his face in what Keith assumes is supposed to be a seductive manner. “In your arms.”

“It only took you three near death experiences, but sure, I’ll commend you for your efforts,” Keith teases, but he’s smiling so hard his cheeks ache with it, can’t even be bothered to try delivering snark in deadpan. Something bright is dawning in him, streaking about in his chest, and pinging off the walls of him with all the warmth of spilled sunlight.

“Oh man.” Lance grins, eyes lighting up like a fucking Christmas tree. “You love me. You’re like, _totally_ head over heels for me. I _knew_ it.”

“Am not,” Keith protests, but his mouth is tingling and his skin is tight and every inch of him is screaming yes more _this_ , and all he can think about is how this must be what coming home feels like to the people that have one.

It might not be love, but when Keith rolls his eyes at Lance’s continued smirk and goes to kiss it off of him, and it really does feel better than anything. Like they’re flying faster than the speed of sound, hurtling light years away from everyone else, and Keith can finally brush his fingertips against those twinkling stars.

Yeah, that might not be love, but it’s something goddamn near to it.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Warning/Spoilers for potentially triggering eating behavior: Lance deliberately does not eat for a brief part of the story in an attempt to make the team’s rations last longer, and he ends up passing out from it.


End file.
